The Mechanics Behavior Of Vessel Collisions With Large Bridge Pier And Its Protection

Bridge pier impact by vessel is one of the most frequent accidents that maylead to bridge failure.To reliably assess bridge response and damage due tovessel impact, and design a bridge pier to resist such impact, the impact forceshould be accurately estimated. Most of the previous research achievements ofnumerical simulation of vessel collision with bridge piers, the pier wasassumed to be rigid or elastic and the interaction between the vessel and thepier was neglected in most cases. As a matter of fact, pier’s plasticdeformation and damage will absorb impact energy and also prolong theinteraction time, so the impact of the estimate might not be accurately.In thispaper, a numerical model of barge–pier impact is developed in ANSYS. Thepier is modeled with HJC concrete and kinematic and isotropic hardening rebarto more realistically generate the bridge pier characteristics. The reliability ofthe numerical model calibrated with some results available in the literature.The pier impact force and barge crush depth of rigid and nonlinear pier withdifferent velocities；The pier impact force，the pier internal energy，the pierdisplacement and barge crush depth are calculated in this paper. Thecalculation results can provide certain reference for the bridge pier anticollision designing.The study of bridge anti-collision device status today isalso discussed in this paper.