# title
Full Scale Crash Test of a 36-Ton Truck against a Barrier on Top of an MSE Wall

# abstract
ASCE 2015. Barriers are built on the side of the road anytime there is a significant drop in elevation at the edge of the pavement. This includes the top of MSE retaining walls. In that case however, there is no possibility to anchor the barrier in the wall facing because of its lack of strength for this purpose. Instead, an L shape barrier is used to contain the truck during impact. The width of the moment slab must be large enough to resist any rotation under the horizontal force generated during impact. Furthermore, the load transferred to the MSE wall reinforcement must be accounted for in the design. An 18 wheeler truck weighing approximately 360 kN (36 tons) was crash tested against an instrumented Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) wall. The test was successful because the truck was redirected on to the pavement, the barrier did not break, the wall panel movement was acceptable, and, while the top layer of reinforcement strips failed in friction, they did for such a short period of time that the displacement was acceptable. The paper describes the wall construction, the instrumentation, the crash test, and some of the results.

# authors[].organizations[].label
Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES)

# publisher.label
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

# authorList[]
Saez, D., Maddah, L. S., Bligh, R., Mirdamadi, A., & Briaud, J.