Response Analysis of Floating Bridges in Waves

Abstract

The need for vehicles transportation among Japanese islands is very important, and many large fixed bridges have been constructed across the rivers as well as seas. But, the concept of a floating bridge takes advantage of natural law of buoyancy of water to support the dead and live loads on the bridge. In addition, there is no need for conventional piers and foundation. However, there is not so many data base on such structures, and a direct design should be employed for each case. Therefore, it is important to evaluate their overall behavior in preliminary design stages. In the present study, a method has been developed to evaluate hydrodynamic loads on floating parts of the bridge and to analyze the dynamic behavior of the structure by using FEM. The proposed method takes into account the hydrodynamic interaction among the floating parts and nonlinear effects such as drag forces. Furthermore, based on numerical results, effects of wave conditions on the dynamic behavior of the bridge are investigated.