Plastic barrier for industrial applications - Characterization under impact loading using testing and Ls-Dyna®

Safety structures are needed in industrial areas to protect people, machines or goods from forklift circulation. Steel roadside safety barriers are often chosen but the accuracy of these structures designed to restraint a light vehicle under a low angle but at high speed is not obvious. After several (even soft) impacts or contacts, this kind of devices suffers of a poor aspect and some parts have to be changed quite frequently. Plastic barriers developed by BOPLAN present the interest of elastic behaviour which allows to reduce significantly the number of repairs or maintenance operations on the one hand. One the other hand, the use of plastic structures is not a common choice and without any normative context concerning these products, commercial efforts are required to demonstrate the effectiveness of the structures. In order to help in the selection of the barrier type and in order to have scientific arguments, a meaningful collaboration combining testing, numerical simulation and mathematical models was set- up with the final aim to obtain a user friendly interface for structure selection as a function of conditions of use (Mass of forklift, customer regulation speed, etc...).