Bridges play a critical role in land transport. However, piers in waterways serve as obstacles to navigable ships, endangering safe ship navigation [
1,
2,
3,
4]. This issue is amplified by the increasing tonnage and number of ships, highlighting the conflict between water-related piers. As a result, there are significant challenges to the safety of ship navigation in inland river bridge waters. Existing bridge collision avoidance systems can be divided into passive collision avoidance and intelligent early warning systems, according to the role of collision avoidance [
5]. Existing passive collision avoidance devices mainly consist of collision fenders and energy dissipation collision avoidance setups [
6]. In recent years, materials such as fiber-reinforced polymers [
7,
8,
9,
10,
11], carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers [
12,
13], and rubber and concrete damping supplies [
14,
15,
16,
17] have gained traction due to their energy absorption capabilities and use in passive applications as anti-vessel collision devices. Existing intelligent early warning systems mainly consist of laser-ranging alarm systems, which serve as the main safety component for ship navigation in inland bridge waters. Existing intelligent warning systems include laser-ranging alarm systems, infrared surveillance, and acoustic alert systems. Some studies have integrated new algorithms, such as automatic target recognition and the tracking (ATR) framework based on sparse coding [
18], as well as new algorithms based on image and motion-related information [
19], into intelligent warning systems to improve warning accuracy. However, these intelligent warning systems only have an effect on ship yaw resulting from specific factors. If the intelligent warning system fails to warn a ship effectively, passive collision avoidance devices are still needed to ensure the safety of the bridge [
20]. Once a ship bridge collision occurs, it affects the normal navigation of the waterway and can even cause major bridge damage and negative societal impacts. For example, on 28 February 2019, the Russian cargo ship Sigran collided with the Gwanganri Bridge in Busan, South Korea, after deviating from the navigation channel due to improper operation shown in
Figure 1a. Similarly, on 6 April 2019, a bridge over the Mojo River in Pará, Brazil, partially collapsed after it was hit by a ship, resulting in approximately 200 m of bridge deck damage and two cars falling into the river, as shown in
Figure 1b.
Current anti-collision devices lack true active collision prevention. In cases where collisions cannot be avoided, passive protective devices are still needed to ensure bridge safety, protect both the ship and the bridge, and prevent other issues. Therefore, an active anti-collision method for bridges based on hydrodynamic energetic beams was proposed in this work, using hydrodynamic energetic beams to form an intervention belt with pressure greater than on the backflow surface. The energetic beams were gradually curved along the direction of the flow and eventually aligned with the direction of the cross-flow [
21]. Subsequently, an intervention belt was used to direct the bow of the yawing ship to realize active collision avoidance. An existing warning system and passive anti-ship collision device formed the Trinity Bridge anti-ship collision system. Consisting of the bridge abutment in the bridge section, the river flow conditions, and the channel level, the bridge channel was divided into a warning area, emergency area, intervention area, and bridge area. Three lines of defense were built to ensure the safety of navigation in the bridge area waters, as shown in
Figure 2. A hydraulic high-energy beam device was installed in the intervention area, and high-accuracy detectors and a water flow interference linkage system were deployed on the bridge. When a yawing ship entered the emergency area and was still yawing after an invalid warning, the hydraulic high-energy beam device was deployed. The operation principle of the hydraulic high-energy beam device is shown in
Figure 3. By monitoring the ship’s movement trajectory in the waters around the bridge area, a hydraulic high-energy beam device in the intervention zone was set on the side of the bow of the vessel to change the ship’s direction and ensure active collision avoidance. This reduced the risk of the ship hitting the collision avoidance devices and causing damage to the ship, enhancing the safety of the navigable sections of the river and the bridge [
19].
In this study, a bridge in the Jialing River basin was taken as the engineering background, and a typical ship in a navigable river section was taken as the research object. To prove the effectiveness of the device [
20], numerical simulations and generalized model tests were carried out using a Fluent overset grid [
22,
23] technology and RNG k-ε turbulence model [
24,
25] to explore the reasonable deployment angle of the device and clarify the optimal jet ratio of the device, R. Finally, by comparing the optimal jet ratio and the difference of the ship’s motion and response state at the reasonable deployment angle, we provided a basis for the research and development of safe, efficient, and green collision avoidance technology and equipment for ships and bridges.