Study on Crashworthiness Performance of an Airbag Anti-Collision Device for Vessel-Bridge Collision

Abstract Collisions between ships and bridges are a developing common occurrence. The design of suitable bridge anti-ship collision devices is essential to reduce economic losses and casualties in ship-bridge collisions. Existing bridge anti-collision devices mainly rely on the deformation of devices and ships to absorb energy to reduce the collision force on the bridge, the structural damage to the ship is often large. Therefore, in this paper, an airbag-type flexible anti-ship collision device is designed, and the collision prevention performance of the anti-collision is studied and verified using scaled tests and numerical simulations. The anti-collision airbag is capsule in appearance and consists of a layer of polyurethane and two layers of ultra-high polymer polyethylene silk. In this paper, material property tests of airbag component materials were carried out to obtain relevant mechanical property parameters, and LS-DYNA was used to simulate the process of collision. Subsequently, a scaled model test of collision with this kind of airbag was designed, and test data such as collision force histories, acceleration histories, and airbag internal pressure were obtained. The test data were compared with the simulation results. The crash time, peak pressure change in the airbag and the extreme value of the crash force were similar, but there were some differences in the acceleration of the ship. The reasons for those differences were analyzed. Subsequently, the finite element simulation method was used to compare the magnitude of collision time and collision force extremes with or without airbags. The crashworthiness of airbags was investigated. The results of the study can provide ideas for the design of flexible bridge anti-collision devices.