An Investigation Of The Reynolds Number Effect Of Static Aerodynamic Coefficients In Bridge Deck Using CFD

The three component coefficients are key parameters in the bridge wind-resisted design. With the bridge deck section becoming more streamline-like, higher requirement of precision in bridge analysis, the influence of the Reynolds number effects of bridge section on bridge wind-resistance analysis and calculation is becoming too crucial to be ignored. Although more and more domestic and foreign scholars pay attention to the Reynolds number effects of bridge deck section and carry out lots of tests on it, only few engineering problems could be solved because the Reynolds number effects varies with the shape of bridge deck section. Therefore the research of Reynolds number effect of bridge deck section is difficult and obtains few achievements.The main approach is wind tunnel test, which has been well developed. But it costs considerable time, labor and funds. With the computational technology developing, CFD has been widely applied as analyses tool in the field of structure wind engineering, and it is possible to obtain some parameters used in wind load computation. Researchers can do computations with full scale model using CFD, which overcomes the shortages arising from the wind tunnel testIn this paper, there're two typical bridge deck sections: streamline-like bridge deck section andΠ-type bridge deck section computed by using CFD software—Fluent. The three component coefficients varying with the Reynolds number are numerically simulated. The full scale models are built and meshed. Three different turbulent models have been used in this paper: k -εmodel, RSM model, and S.P model. Several important conclusions were drawn by comparing the results of numerical simulation with those of wind tunnel test. At last, for further engineering research, the Sutong bridge deck section was also studied. Although the result is exciting, the precision of computation needs to be enhanced in future.