Citation

Wang L, Yang L, Huang D, Zhang Z, Chen G. Int. J. Impact Eng. 2008; 35(8): 895-904.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ijimpeng.2007.12.005

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Transportation plays an important role in national economy. Among a variety of transportation means, the land-carriage and water-carriage occupy the most prominent position, and both of which are inevitably related to bridges. Bridge is indispensable passages across rivers and bays for land-carriage, while on the other hand it is man-made obstacle for the water-carriage. Hence accidents caused by ship–bridge collision happen often since the number of bridges increased quickly in the past several decades. Those accidents may result in serious social and economic evil consequences such as bridge fall, ship sink, person casualties, environmental pollution, interruption of the land and water conveyance, etc. With the increase of huge ships and large bridges, the problem becomes more serious and thus more attention should be paid to the techniques of how to avoid the increasingly serious accidents due to ship–bridge collisions. The basic way to solve this problem, almost in all times and in all over the world, is to construct protection devices. The key lies in how to correctly understand the dynamic process of ship–bridge collision, and based on such knowledge, how to reasonably design protective devices. In order to avoid increasingly serious accidents caused by ship-bridge collision, a new flexible, energy-dissipating crashworthy device is developed, which essentially consists of hundreds of steel-wire-rope coil (SWRC) connected in parallel and series. Experiments show that the force-displacement behavior of the SWRC is rate-dependent and energy dissipating, which is successfully modeled by the ZWT nonlinear visco-elastic relation in the present paper. By using the dynamic finite-element code incorporated with the force-displacement model of the SWRC, dynamic numerical simulations are performed for several typical cases of ship-bridge collision. The results indicate that the peak of impact force markedly decreases due to high compliance (low wave impedance) and viscous energy dissipation characteristic of SWRCs. Particularly, the new device enables the ship having enough time to turn its navigating direction away and consequently a large percentage of initial kinetic energy of ship is carried by the turning-away ship.