An Equivalent Continuum Approach to Efficiently Model the Response of Steel Wire Meshes to Rockfall Impacts

Steel wire meshes are a key component of rockfall protection barriers. The efficiency in reproducing the structure response with numerical methods relies upon the specific modelling technique employed to capture the wire mesh behaviour. The fabric of some rockfall meshes, such as chain-links is quite complex, which leads to sophisticated and costly numerical models, if modelled accurately. This paper presents an efficient approach to model the response of steel wire meshes to rockfall impacts by using shell elements to develop an equivalent continuum model. An elastoplastic behaviour is prescribed to the shell elements to reproduce the results of a set of experimental data, carried out on mesh portions under various load paths and boundary conditions. The idea is that simple laboratory tests can be used to calibrate an effective numerical model of the steel wire mesh with a significantly lower computational cost if compared to other effective solutions. The model’s ability in yielding consistent results when implemented at the structure scale is then assessed, based on the data of full-scale impact tests on a three-span low-energy rockfall barrier. The method can be extended to other wire mesh types and can find convenient application on exploring the response of a rockfall barrier with a cost-effective tool.