• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.3A
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• pp.199-206
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• 2011

In Korea, the current design codes for the bridge vessel collision load are based on AASHTO LRFD code which derived from the mean collision forces of the Woisin's test. To estimate the conservativeness of the code, in this study, the mean forces of head on collisions were evaluated from the mass-acceleration relationship of vessel and the deformation-kinetic energy relationship of bow those obtained from the series of nonlinear finite element analysis, and the mean forces were compared to that in AASHTO design code. As results, the variations of the mean forces versus the sizes of vessels were represented similar tendency, even those of the code are very conservative. However, the variations of mean collision force versus those of collision speeds were dominated by the plastic deformation of bow and it was differ from those of the code that have linear relationship with the collision speeds.