ROAD SAFETY
EZY-GUARD 4
NEXT GENERATION STEEL GUARDRAIL BARRIER Ingal Civil Products strives to lead the charge in developing the latest safety barrier technology for the Australian market. One of these systems – Ezy-Guard 4 – is the fruit of those labours. The company’s extensive research and development processes have been core components in producing this latest product, which is an evolution of the existing barriers in Ingal Civil Products’ range. Luke Gallagher, Product Manager at Ingal Civil Products, says the story of the EzyGuard 4 dates back to the revision of the American crash testing standard – the Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) – which was published in 2009. The basic and perhaps most common guardrail around – the G4 W-Beam Guardrail Crash barrier, which has been available in the Australian market for many of years – is deemed to comply to the old crash testing standard, NCHRP-350. With the new Australian Standard for highway safety barriers using the American standards as a basis for all crash testing, Ingal Civil Products saw the opportunity to modernise its existing guardrail product and introduce a MASH compliant product. MASH places more emphasis on the barrier design with more stringent acceptance criteria on the crash test results, increased vehicle sizes to better represent the modern fleet and a strong focus on vehicle occupant outcomes.
30 Highway Engineering Australia | Oct/Nov 2017
As such, Ingal Civil Products’ evolution of the W-Beam barrier – the Ezy-Guard Smart – became the first system compliant with MASH TL3 in Australia. While the Ezy-Guard Smart barrier has been a well-received addition to the Australian market, Mr Gallagher says Ingal Civil Products is always looking for more ways to improve and update its safety barrier technology. “In late 2014 we started to look at how we could increase the vehicle containment level of that product. "That’s when we came up with Ezy-Guard 4, which is the fourth iteration of the EzyGuard product,” he says. The next generation steel guardrail barrier has been crash tested to MASH TL3 and NCHRP-350 TL4 containment, which is equal to a 2270-kilogram utility hitting the barrier at 100 kilometres per hour and an 8000-kilogram truck impacting on the rail at 80 kilometres per hour – an increase on the Ezy-Guard Smart’s containment level. It is the first W-Beam system in Australia to be approved to Test Level 4. “We were looking at how we could improve the level of containment from a large passenger vehicle to a small truck, which is a big increase in vehicle mass and geometry,” says Mr Gallagher. The system offers superior protection and has low occupant risk values due to its unique design.
When a vehicle hits the barrier, the impact energy is dissipated through the posts and tensile forces put on the W-beam. The Z-posts provide a forgiving impact, helping to reduce ride-down deceleration forces and minimise risks to occupants. The Ezy-Guard 4 was approved for use on Australian roads just over six months ago, and Mr Gallagher anticipates its traction in overseas markets, particularly in New Zealand, North America and the Middle East, will be repeated here in Australia.