Analysis on the Damage of High-piled Wharf Under Ship Impact Load

As an open structure, high-piled wharf has advantages on lightweight structure, high capacity and low material consumption. In the meantime, it has poor ability on bearing horizontal load, especially ship impact load which causes great damage to structure’s component. This paper sets up numerical model of the high-piled wharf under ship impact load to probe components’ damage, based on a wharf in shanghai.

Mainly considering ship impact load, this model is built in 2D form with ABAQUS.The designed ship type is 5000 TEU container ship which causes 47.6 kPa pressure on the berthing member. The model is applied with 20 kPa vertical pressure and takes a fixed constraint on the low end of the pile. The contact between pile, pile cap, beam and berthing member all adopt the method of fixed connection in which makes the model a whole and use the material of C40 concrete.

Figure.1 shows that three rear oblique pile and the intersectional position of the first pile cap with beam have the biggest mises stress and the former piles below the second, fourth and sixth pile cap have the biggest deformation. The red point display that it occurs stress concentration at this position which causes concrete damage firstly. It can also imply that three red pile mainly bear pressure and three great deformation pile beartensile stress that appear concrete crack. For a certain high piled wharf, the position of the stress concentration and oblique pile are the most sensitive area affected by ship impact load.

This paper just simulates a simple high piled wharf that the ship load acts on the whole section of the berthing member without considering the interaction between pile and soil layer, the influence of water level on ship load and the number of impacts. Next stage will focus on establishing a model that contains the factor mentioned before to study the ship impact load on high piled wharf.