• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.55-60
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• 2010

The honeycomb composite joint structure designed for application to a tilting KTX railroad car body is subjected to bending loads of a cantilever type. Honeycomb sandwich composite panel-joint attached in the real tilting car body was fabricated and sectioned as several beam-joint specimens for the bending test. The fracture behaviors of these specimens under static loads were different from those under cyclic loads. Static bending loads caused shear deformation and fracture in the honeycomb core region, while fatigue cyclic bend loading caused delamination along the interface between the composite skin and the honeycomb core, and/or caused a fracture in the welded part jointed with the steel under-frame. These fracture behaviors could occur in other industrial honeycomb composite joints with similar sub-structures, and be used for improving design parameters of a honeycomb composite joint structure.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.165-183
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• 2022

Most transportation departments have recognized and developed procedures to address the ever-increasing weights of trucks traveling on bridges in a service today. Transportation agencies also recognize the issues with overheight vehicles' collisions with bridges, but few stakeholders have definitive countermeasures. Bridges are becoming more vulnerable to collisions from overheight vehicles. The exact response under lateral impact force is difficult to predict. In this paper, nonlinear impact analysis shows that the degree of deformation recorded through the modeling of the unprotected vehicle-girder model provides realistic results compared to the observation from the US-61 bridge overheight vehicle impact. The predicted displacements are 0.229 m, 0.161 m, and 0.271 m in the girder bottom flange (lateral), bottom flange (vertical), and web (lateral) deformations, respectively, due to a truck traveling at 112.65 km/h. With such large deformations, the integrity of an impacted bridge becomes jeopardized, which in most cases requires closing the bridge for safety reasons and a need for rehabilitation. We proposed different sacrificial cushion systems to dissipate the energy of an overheight vehicle impact. The goal was to design and tune a suitable energy absorbing system that can protect the bridge and possibly reduce stresses in the overheight vehicle, minimizing the consequences of an impact. A material representing a Sorbothane high impact rubber was chosen and modeled in ANSYS. Out of three sacrificial schemes, a sandwich system is the best in protecting both the bridge and the overheight vehicle. The mitigation system reduced the lateral deflection in the bottom flange by 89%. The system decreased the stresses in the bridge girder and the top portion of the vehicle by 82% and 25%, respectively. The results reveal the capability of the proposed sacrificial system as an effective mitigation system.