Abstract:
The environment (mainly temperature and moisture content) affects wood mechanical properties. On the roadside, those parameters can vary and cannot be controlled. One interest of a numerical model is to take into account those variations in order to obtain a corridor of responses and, thus, to assess their effect on the vehicle restraint system (VRS) performance. Steel–wood devices are in fashion in places where infrastructure has to be discrete (mountains or countryside). In this paper, the effect of wood mechanical properties variation due to environmental variables is illustrated. The variation of the environmental variables proposed in the material law is applied to a VRS numerical model in a parametric study. The effect of this variation is very limited towards the device performance in terms of severity. For the lowest value of moisture content and temperature, the brittle behavior of wood leads to failure of some wood beams which only affects deflection measurements without challenging the proper behavior of the VRS under vehicle impact. Thus, steel–wood devices, characterized by good severity indices, should not only be considered environmentally friendly but also safe.
