Modelling for the design of passive protection measures against rock fall

An increasing need of protecting the civil installations against natural hazards—like very rapid soil and rock movements—is due to the extensive mountain territories usage for infrastructures and residential areas. In this study, the so-called flexible falling rock protection barriers, which can be numbered among passive solutions against rock fall, are analyzed in detail. These structures have been historically designed on the basis of full-scale impact tests on barrier prototypes. Based on a reliable experimental database, a numerical approach has been recently proposed for the modelling of these struc-tures, which has proved to reproduce all the relevant quantities for the description of the barrier response with time. The very good fit of the experimental and numerical results can provide further confidence on the use of such models as predictive tools to support the design of flexible falling rock protection barriers under different scenarios.