Simplified Assessment of Ship Impact on Navigation Lock Gates

This paper presents a simplified methodology for treating collisions of ships with lock gates. The goal is to obtain a good approximation of the law relating the resistance of the gate and the penetration of the striking vessel. To do so, we assume that the initial kinetic energy of the ship is dissipated by deforming the structure. As a first step, deformations are assumed to take place in localized regions. However, for larger indentations, a global bending mode is postulated on the entire gate. The first part of the article is devoted to a brief presentation of the basic law relating and under the hypothesis of a local deforming mode. In the second part, we shortly expose the way for dealing with the global bending mode. Finally, the last section presents a comparison between numerical results obtained by finite element analyses and those derived by our simplified methodology. A quite good accordance is found between the two approaches.