Assessment of Performance and Cost-Effectiveness for the Rockfall Protection Fence Using a High Carbon Steel Wire Rod

고장력 경강선을 적용한 낙석방지울타리의 성능 및 경제성 평가

In Korea, more than 70% of the territory consists of mountains. Therefore, the construction of roads and railways has generally involved with a steep rock slope in which the event of rockfalls are often occurred due to the weathered rock conditions and rainfalls etc. This is dangerous when the rock falls into the road and railway on which vehicles and trains are running. In order to prevent such rockfalls, the rockfall protection fence consisting of post, wire rope, and PVC coating steel net has most used at the bottom of rock slopes. In a general practice, an absorbing rockfall energy, 50kJ is specified by the Ministry of Construction and Transportation. However, questions still remain about whether the rockfall protection fence works effectively or not. In this study, a typical wire rope used in the standard rockfall protection fence was replaced by the high carbon steel wire rod and to validate its capacity of rockfall energy absorbing the field rockfall tests were conducted. The testing results show that a new rockfall protection fence using the high carbon steel wire rods can absorb the rockfall energy more than 50kJ and 20% of construction cost was saved in comparison with the previous rockfall protection fence.