A simplified analytical method to estimate the resistance of plane lock gates impacted by river barges

•The paper is concerned with the crashworthiness of plane lock gates impacted by river barges.•An analytical method is developed to evaluate the resistance of plane lock gates impacted by such vessels.•The behavior of the gate is decomposed between a local crushing and an overall bending that are both treated analytically.•The results provided by the simplified approach are corroborated by nonlinear finite-element analyses.

This paper presents a simplified analytical method to evaluate the resistance of a single plating lock gate impacted by a river barge. The approach is based on the assumption that the gate behavior may be divided into two successive phases. At the beginning of the collision, local crushing of some structural elements occurs concomitantly with small overall elastic motion of the entire gate. Then, when the penetration of the barge into the gate becomes important, a global plastic mechanism develops over the entire structure. In addition to the membrane and bending deformations occurring classically in such collisions, the particular flat shape of the striking barge bow leads to shear deformations near the gate edges. For all these deformation modes, closed-form expressions of the gate resistance are derived for both local and global deformation phases by applying the upper-bound method. These analytical developments are then validated through comparisons with numerical solutions obtained from non-linear finite-element simulations.