3D finite element modelling of chain-link drapery system

Rockfall can cause loss of lives and significant damage to infrastructure and requires adequately designed protection structures to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. In Australia, rockfall draperies are more and more used as a passive protection structure although some research is still required to fully characterize the performance of draperies. Full-scale experimentation on rockfall drapery systems is very expensive and time consuming so that numerical methods are a useful and more economical alternative in order to better understand the behaviour of such systems. This paper presents a realistic 3D model of a chain-link drapery system developed with the commercially available finite element package of ABAQUS. The dynamic response of the system was simulated by incorporating the elastoplastic constitutive model in the explicit procedure of the solution. The developed model was calibrated by comparing the numerical results with the results of the laboratory-scale experiments. Preliminary results showed that the calibrated model was capable of predicting the system response with reasonable accuracy. In future, the model will be used in order to conduct parametric studies on different aspects of rockfall drapery design including slope material properties, number and spacing of anchors, impact energy, slope inclination, height of drapery system and block size.