Abstract
Delineators are used to mark roadways to indicate to motorists the location of the edge of the road, lane reduction transitions and curves. They are an effective guidance device especially at night and adverse weather conditions. Due to their location near traffic, delineators are often impacted by out-of-control or drifting vehicles. Therefore, they must be designed to be robust enough to take impact loads and must be flexible. The standard method for delineator testing is usually live impact testing or laboratory testing like rigidity or bending test. These tend to be costly and laborious and are not always an optimum solution because they are done post manufacturing. In addition, these tests do not give any insight into the dynamics of the delineator. Information on high stress and high strain areas, areas of failure, impact force on the delineator are unknown. This data can be obtained by constructing an accurate analytical model for the delineator. To the best of our knowledge, no such analytical model for delineator has been developed in the open literature because the physics involved is complex. For instance, the forces imposed on the delineator are likely due to the friction of the outer surface, weight and impact speed of the vehicle. The flexibility of the post is likely due to the material properties, wall thickness, shape, and size. Although all of these factors affect the performance of a delineator, it is not known how much each contributes. Analyzing flexible delineators is a challenge because it involves non-linear analysis. An analytical model will provide an emulation environment to do simulation and fine tune parameters before doing live impact testing. Based on the results from impact testing design parameters can be modified to get better performance from the delineators. In this thesis, delineator assembly was modelled in SolidWorks and the geometry was imported to ANSYS Explicit Dynamics Solver for finite element and impact analysis. In Explicit Dynamics, impact simulation was performed and the results such as maximum equivalent stress, max equivalent strain, impact force and kinetic energy on the delineator post are presented.