Abstract
Barge impact is a potential hazard for bridge piers located in navigation waterways. Protective structures of different types, for example, dolphin structures, artificial islands, and guiding structures, have been widely used in bridge designs against barge impact. However, such structures often imply high cost and suffer from difficulties in installation as well as maintenance challenges. This paper aims to devise and investigate a new type of crashworthy device which is comprised of vertically supported impact cap connected to the bridge pier using a series of steel beams in a frame-type arrangement. This sacrificial steel structure is designed to form plastic hinges for energy dissipation whilst limiting the force transmitted to the protected pier. The dynamic analysis of the proposed crashworthy device subjected to barge impact is conducted using a simplified impact model previously developed by the authors. The parametric studies in this paper show that the proposed device has a large energy dissipation capacity and that the magnitude of impact force transmitted to the bridge pier can be dramatically reduced. In addition, an optimization model is proposed in this paper to achieve the cost-optimized design of the crashworthy device for a given impact scenario with constraints as per the prescribed design requirements.
Highlights
Bridge piers located in navigation waterways are often threatened by vessel impact due to the increment of vessel transportation volume
Barge impact is a potential hazard for bridge piers located in navigation waterways
Barge collisions upon bridge structures were frequently reported. Such collisions can often lead to catastrophic consequences including human casualties and economic losses; substantial investigations regarding the quantification of barge impact loading and dynamic structural responses have been conducted in recent years [3,4,5,6,7,8]
Summary
Bridge piers located in navigation waterways are often threatened by vessel impact due to the increment of vessel transportation volume. E problems related to the above mentioned protective structures have led to the investigation of bridge protections from impact by strengthening the bridge piers themselves, for example, with carbon fibre-reinforced polymers (CFRPs) [6, 14] Such strengthening techniques can improve the pier resistance; that is, the pier undergoes less damage during impact. Is paper employs such simpli ed impact model to investigate the energy dissipation capacity of the proposed device and the magnitude of impact force transmitted to the bridge pier by the steel beams during impact for di erent structural con gurations. E parametric studies in this paper indicate that the proposed device has a large energy dissipation capacity for barge impact and can signi cantly reduce the maximum impact force transmitted to the bridge pier during impact. Examples presented in this paper show that the optimum con guration of the device can be obtained for di erent impact scenarios using the proposed optimization model
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