Abstract
A growing number of bridge structures spanning over waterways are most susceptible to ship-pier collisions that may result in serious consequences such as ship sinking, failure and collapse of the bridge, even personal casualty, etc. To quantify the impact force and load, ship-pier impact tests and reliable numerical predictions should be carried out. This paper shows experimental tests and numerical simulation results of ship impact on bridge piers. To assess the performance of circular reinforced concrete piers against ship collisions and guide the design of bridge piers against impact, reduced-scale circular reinforced concrete (RC) piers were built and tested, and finite element (FE) simulations based on edge pier of junction pier of Wu-Song River Bridge were also conducted. To evaluate the reasonability of the damage process and failure mode of the pier due to ship impact more accurately, the bridge piers are modeled with nonlinear materials to simulate the bridge pier characteristics instead of rigid and elastic materials. Based on numerical results, the design impact loads prescribed by code current specifications such as Eurocode and AASHTO Bridge Design Specifications were evaluated and compared. To predict impact force, the fiber section model was employed to attain ultimate bearing capacity of the pier.
Highlights
A significant number of bridges spanning navigable waterways are put into use all over the world, which are inherently subjected to various impact loads such as wind loads, vehicle loads, passing ship loads, etc
Ship collisions are regarded as a significant issue as growing number of accidents accused by ship colliding with bridge piers in recent decades (AASHTO 2009; Consolazio and Cowan 2005; Fang et al 2016a; Sherif et al 2015)
The results show that the design force of ship collision specified by AASHTO specifications is in good accordance with the testing results
Summary
A significant number of bridges spanning navigable waterways are put into use all over the world, which are inherently subjected to various impact loads such as wind loads, vehicle loads, passing ship loads, etc. Ship collisions are regarded as a significant issue as growing number of accidents accused by ship colliding with bridge piers in recent decades (AASHTO 2009; Consolazio and Cowan 2005; Fang et al 2016a; Sherif et al 2015). Ship collision with piers might lead to tremendous damage, even failure and collapse of bridges and personal casualty. It is of importance to prevent and protect bridge piers from ship collision, which has been drawn great attentions. There are mainly two approaches in studying the ship-pier collisions, i.e., experimental tests and numerical simulations.
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