Ship Collision Protection for Sea-Crossing Long-Span Bridges

The socio-economic importance and location of long-span bridges render them more sensitive to ship collision and imply careful consideration of the series of uncertainties involved. This paper proposes a ship collision risk assessment procedure of dolphin-protected long-span bridges considering various uncertainties. The events such as ship aberrancy, ship-bridge pier collision and collision-induced pier collapse are represented via probabilistic approaches. The vertical impact location and collision angle between the colliding ship and bridge pier are considered as risk- governing variables. Finally, the ship collision risk of dolphin-protected bridge is assessed using the developed ship-dolphin collision simulation program. A numerical simulation performed on Incheon Bridge shows that more reliable design can be obtained.