01518660

Component

Horizontal curve combined with vertical alignment is a typical component of freeway in mountainous areas. There’s no quantitative standard of each element on combined alignment in current Chinese standards. Improper combination might cause serious safety problems in operation. Attention has been paid on correlation between combined alignment and accident data using statistical models. But quantified indices regarding horizontal curve combined with vertical alignment have not been established. Skid and rollover are significant threats to vehicle safety, mainly caused by excessive lateral acceleration. Correlation between lateral stability and combined alignment has been investigated based on real world experiments. The sample of the real world experiment is limited and the driving environment cannot be controlled for research purpose. Therefore, it is difficult to quantify the influence accurately based on real world experiments. It’s urgent to use a better approach to quantify the influence of horizontal curve combined with vertical alignment on lateral stability. For this study, an experiment was carried out on Tongji University’s 8 degree-of-freedom driving simulator. Bayesian multiple linear regression models were developed to quantify the correlation between lateral acceleration and the alignment elements. Results suggest that vehicle lateral acceleration is significantly affected by horizontal curve radius on all combined sections while other factors have varying degrees of influence on different types of combination segments. Based on the regression models, safe domain analysis was conducted to provide appropriate quantitative index of each element. Results indicated that minimum of horizontal curve was different on different combined segment.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AND10 Vehicle User Characteristics. Alternate title: Lateral Stability of Horizontal Curve Combined with Vertical Alignment: Driving Simulator-Based Study.

01503729

14-3597

English

25p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Photos; References; Tables

Alignment; Driving simulators; Freeways; Geometric design; Highway curves; Highway factors in crashes; Motor vehicle dynamics; Mountain roads

Hunan (China)

Design; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I21: Planning of Transport Infrastructure; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-3597

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 3:14PM