South African performance based standards (PBS) vehicle to transport steel pipes

Abstract

The preliminary design of a South African PBS vehicle to transport large-bore welded steel pipes is an important milestone in developing local expertise to analyse PBS designs. The design approach has drawn extensively from the PBS measures developed in Australia. Nevertheless, the design conforms to South African axle load and bridge formula legislation. Simple analytical equations, based on geometry and previous empirical research, were used to optimise the payload and PBS performance measures: an efficient and novel design approach. Using the optimisation model, an A-Double design was shown to exceed all of the PBS safety requirements for L2 performance with a 50% increase in payload over the baseline vehicle. This optimised solution was verified using TruckSim 8.0. The predictions from the optimisation model were highly accurate with the exception of SRT and upper limit for RA, which were reasonably accurate.