Experiment of bearing performance of main pier of Shijiu Lake Bridge subjected to ship collision load

To evaluate the performance of bridge piers against the ship collision and to guide the design checking calculation and the anti-collision scheme design of the piers, the main pier No. 217 of the Shijiu Lake Bridge was taken as the research object and through the scaled-down model tests of the ship-bridge collision, the collision forces, dynamic responses and failure process of the rectangular section concrete pier at the time the pier was being collided by ship were studied and the results of the tests were compared to those of the finite element simulation. The results of the study show that under the ship collision load, the shear failure occurs mainly in the main pier of the bridge. The main failure mode and failure process of the pier are that the bending shear failure governed by the shear failure changes into the bending shear failure governed by the bending failure and the local part of the concrete is crushed. The collision force is approximately directly proportional to the ship collision speed and is associated with the rigidity of the collision object.