Vortex-Induced Vibration of a Cable-Stayed Bridge

Abstract

The dynamic response of a cable-stayed bridge that consists of a simply supported four-cable-stayed deck beam and two rigid towers, subjected to a distributed vortex shedding force on the deck beam with a uniform rectangular cross section, is studied in this work. The cable-stayed bridge is modeled as a continuous system, and the distributed vortex shedding force on the deck beam is modeled using Ehsan-Scanlan’s model. Orthogonality conditions of exact mode shapes of the linearized undamped cable-stayed bridge model are employed to convert coupled governing partial differential equations of the original cable-stayed bridge model with damping to a set of ordinary differential equations by using Galerkin method. The dynamic response of the cable-stayed bridge is calculated using Runge-Kutta-Felhberg method in MATLAB for two cases with and without geometric nonlinear terms. Convergence of the dynamic response from Galerkin method is investigated. Numerical results show that the geometric nonlinearities of stay cables have significant influence on vortex-induced vibration of the cable-stayed bridge. There are different limit cycles in the case of neglecting the geometric nonlinear terms, and there are only one limit cycle and chaotic responses in the case of considering the geometric nonlinear terms.