An efficient approach for ship collision design of reinforced concrete pontoon walls

This paper presents an efficient method for collision design of prestressed concrete pontoon walls. High fidelity finite element models of a container ship bow and a prestressed concrete pontoon wall are first established. Integrated numerical simulations are conducted to study the structural deformation of the pontoon wall during the collision. Parametric studies are also carried out to investigate the effect of the pontoon wall thickness. Based on the failure mode of the pontoon wall, a punching shear check procedure is proposed. This method yields a good accuracy while significantly reduces computational efforts. Hence, the proposed approach can be used for collision analysis in the preliminary design phase of floating pontoons.