Experiments and Hydrodynamic Analysis of an Adaptive Arresting Net Device for Protecting Bridge Piers Against Ship Collisions Available to Purchase

As the accident of a vessel impacting a bridge pier will result in serious disaster, such as bridge fall, ship sink and polluting environment, the technology and method have been investigated to prevent and protect bridges from vessel collisions. An adaptive arresting net crashworthy device has been developed for protecting non-navigable channel piers against ship collisions, which consists of mooring floating boats, mooring cable and mooring anchors, adaptive floating buckets, arresting net, triggering wire rope and constant resistant force cables. When a ship impacts the adaptive arresting net crashworthy device, first the head of the adaptive floating buckets will rise due to the floating force, then the arresting net fixed on the adaptive floating buckets captures and stops the ship. Enormous kinetic energy is consumed by a series of resistant force cables failure. The present paper presents the ship collision tests at full scale and hydrodynamic analysis of the adaptive arresting net crashworthy device. The ship collision tests has been conducted 6 times by a 1200DWT ship with different speed. The ship are prevented successfully. By using multi-body dynamics and rope dynamic theory, simulation model of the adaptive arresting net crashworthy device is established by hydrodynamic analysis software ANSYS-AQWA. It is found that the numerical simulation results are in reasonable agreement with the experimental results.