A novel anti-collision strategy with integrated tensegrity for the bridge pier

Bridge pier is the key components for transferring loads between the bridge and foundation. Its status significantly impacts on the safety of the entire bridge. While the sudden external force (e.g. vehicle collision, explosion, earthquake etc.) could cause catastrophic properties loss and casualties. Therefore, many anti-collision implementations are used in the bridge pier. The rigid protections and soft buffer structures, which are the conventional anti-collision methods. The former cannot lower the damage to vehicle and passengers, and the latter is capable of withstanding the minor or moderate vehicle collision only. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the conventional anti-collision method, tensegrity as a prestressed tensioned structure is proposed to be integrated with the bridge pier as a shielding component. The integrated tensegrity can absorb impact energy of the vehicle-pier-collision through large deformation or localized damage to protect the core pier. Therefore, this paper proposed a detailed anti-collision design with integration of tensegrity for the bridge pier. Additionally, the assessments of its statics and dynamics are given. Furthermore, the anti-collision effect has been illustrated, numerically. The process of the vehicle-pier-collision in three different velocities were simulated by ANSYS/LS-DYNA; the energy absorption is analyzed. The relationship between deformation state and absorbed energy was also obtained. Therefore, the feasibility of the proposed design has been fully explained. It provides an option for the anti-collision design in the bridge pier.