engineering

Midwest Roadside Safety Facility

Midwest Roadside Safety Facility is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Midwest Roadside Safety Facility rather than just read about it. In short: The Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (Midwest or MwRSF) is a research organization in Lincoln, Nebraska that conducts automotive crash testing. MwRSF is operated by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and researches highway design and safety, with a particular emphasis on safety performance evaluations of roadside appurtenances.

Key takeaways

Midwest Roadside Safety Facility belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Midwest Roadside Safety Facility to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Midwest Roadside Safety Facility from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (Midwest or MwRSF) is a research organization in Lincoln, Nebraska that conducts automotive crash testing. MwRSF is operated by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and researches highway design and safety, with a particular emphasis on safety performance evaluations of roadside appurtenances. Since its establishment in 1974, the facility has evaluated existing barriers and developed new design concepts and technologies for use on public roadways. MwRSF engineers designed and tested the SAFER barrier, an energy-absorbing "soft wall" system installed at all high-speed oval race tracks used by NASCAR and IndyCar.

History Roadside safety research at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln began in 1974, when Edward Post left the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and joined the Civil Engineering department at NU. In its early years, Post's research organization included a handful of graduate students and was primarily funded by the Nebraska Department of Roads (now the Nebraska Department of Transportation). As more state agencies and the Federal Highway Administration began supporting the program, it formally became the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility and began hiring full-time employees. When Post died in 1991, MwRSF hired Dean Sicking, also from TTI, to lead the program. Sicking served as director until 2012, when he accepted a teaching position at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; longtime MwRSF engineer Ronald Faller was named program director upon Sicking's departure. MwRSF has worked on hundreds of roadside safety projects since its inception, many of which are used on highways nationwide. These include the SKT, FLEAT, and BEAT energy-absorbing guardrail end terminals; many variations of W-beam and thrie-beam guardrails, including the complete design and development of the Midwest Guardrail System; and the SAFER barrier. The facility receives funding from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program and frequently presents at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. Though it is headquartered at the Prem S. Paul Research Center just east of NU's City Campus, MwRSF uses an approximately quarter-mile stretch of runway at the Lincoln Airport to conduct crash tests. In 2021, MwRSF tested an 80,000-lb tank truck at fifty miles per hour impacting a sixty-two inch tall constant-slope concrete barrier; because of the immense costs associated, this was the first test of its kind in over thirty years. The barrier was believed to be a suitable replacement for the much larger and costlier ninety-inch barrier used as standard to divide highways and prevent large trucks from encroaching into oncoming lanes.

Pooled Fund The University of Nebraska–Lincoln and NDOT, along with the Kansas Department of Transportation and Missouri Department of Transportation, formed the Midwest States Regional Pooled Fund Program in 1991; the Iowa Department of Transportation and Minnesota Department of Transportation joined soon after. The Pooled Fund was created as a way for states with similar geographic layouts to combine resources and optimize roadside safety research efforts. The program has since expanded to include twenty-one states from across the country. In 2021, the Pooled Fund received $1.235 million in funding from its member departments of transportation and completed twelve projects, including compliance testing for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

SAFER barrier

In 1998, MwRSF was contracted by NASCAR, the Indy Racing League (now IndyCar), and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to develop an energy-absorbing, partially deformable "soft wall" to mitigate the forces involved with high-speed wall impacts. MwRSF engineers tested nearly one hundred materials for optimal effectiveness, cost, and replaceability before settling on Owens Corning FOAMULAR as the primary energy-absorbing mechanism in the barrier. The closed-cell, polystyrene foam was used to partially fill the thirty-inch gap between the existing concrete wall and the steel face of the barrier. During the design and testing of the new barrier, a number of high-profile deaths in NASCAR involving wall impacts, including that of Dale Earnhardt, dramatically increased scrutiny of the United States' most popular racing organization and its efforts to protect drivers. The system was officially named the Steel And Foam Energy Reduction Barrier (abbreviated to "SAFER" barrier); it was first installed at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2002. It was soon implemented in some capacity at every high-speed oval race track used by NASCAR and IndyCar, and there have been no subsequent driver fatalities in any of NASCAR's top-flight series (the Cup Series, Grand National Series, and Truck Series). Many racing stars, notably Jeff Gordon, have praised the inertia-dampening performance of the SAFER barrier; Gordon suggested "SAFER barriers should be on every wall, every track." MwRSF engineers Ronald Faller, Jim Holloway, John Reid, John Rohde, and Dean Sicking were presented with the Louis H. Schwitzer Award for Engineering Innovation and Excellence at the 2002 Indianapolis 500 in recognition of their development of the SAFER barrier.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Midwest Roadside Safety Facility

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Midwest Roadside Safety Facility claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Midwest Roadside Safety Facility before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Midwest Roadside Safety Facility ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Midwest Roadside Safety Facility

In research: Midwest Roadside Safety Facility appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Midwest Roadside Safety Facility in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Midwest Roadside Safety Facility is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1974 establishments in Nebraska, Automotive safety, Road infrastructure in the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Midwest Roadside Safety Facility outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Midwest Roadside Safety Facility in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Midwest Roadside Safety Facility means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Midwest Roadside Safety Facility out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Midwest Roadside Safety Facility in simple terms?

Why does Midwest Roadside Safety Facility matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Midwest Roadside Safety Facility?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Midwest Roadside Safety Facility.