Ritherdon and Co Ltd were invited to give a presentation on the development of our passively safe cabinet to the AFB20 (2) Roadside Safety Group Committee meeting in September. The meeting was hosted by the European Union Road Federation, in conjunction with the Transportation Research Board and the International Road Federation.
Ben Ritherdon, our Managing Director, represented the Company and told the story of how we had worked with Manchester University’s School of MACE to model the impact of a car on the cabinet before carrying out the physical crash tests.
Ben gave a summary of the Finite Element Analysis model of the car and cabinet, and of the parameters we were able to vary. He also described how we were able to test the limits of those parameters. This enabled us to optimise the design of the shearing mechanism of the cabinet and gave us greater confidence that it would work safely in the in-house impact tests and that the final passively safe cabinet prototypes would pass the EN12767 impact tests.
The presentation slides included a video of the high speed impact test and also some slightly more light hearted video clips of our in-house testing involving scrap cars and old tractors!
The AFB20 (20) meeting is a great forum for learning more about research and development in road side safety. Much of the discussion in Brussels was on crash barrier research and impact testing based on the EN1317 testing method. However, there were a few presentations on the EN12767 test and passively safe street furniture like ours.
If you are interested in the story of how we developed the world’s first passively safe road side enclosure, the slides of the presentation are available here. The cabinet’s web page can be found here and please get in touch if you’d like more information on the cabinet itself.
