Numerical Simulation of Tidal Current Force on Twin-Tower Pier

Twin-Tower Pier was designed as a new type of pier for a bridge which is constructed at deep sea site. The feature of the Twin-Tower Pier is two slender towers that are enable to reduce the volume of the concrete, resulting the reduction of the construction cost. Tidal current forces acting on the Twin-Tower Pier had been measured by the hydraulic model test in previous paper because the shape of the pier is more complicated than the shape of a conventional pier which is usually a column type. This paper describes the numerical simulation which is modeled to predict the tidal current force on the Twin-Tower Pier without using hydraulic model tests. The tidal current forces predicted by the numerical simulation are compared with those measured by the hydraulic model test. The comparison between them shows good agreement with the error level of less than 10%.