Wind Engineering Study Of Cantilever Skywalk Bridge

With the booming of urbanization and eco-tourism industry, many pedestrian bridges have been built in the past years. Due to unique shapes and complex surroundings, the conventional theory of wind-induced bridge responses was often found not applicable to pedestrian bridges.,To investigate the wind effects of the world's longest cantilever skywalk bridge,a study was therefore carried out based on comprehensive wind tunnel studies. The scope of work includes the determination of the local wind climate, the establishment of the wind characteristics at bridge site, and design, fabrication, testing and analysis of the aeroelastic model of the study bridge.The thesis contains the following subjects:(1) Review of aerodynamic studies on footbridges and the state-of-art technical approaches in this subject.(2) Wind climate study based on several weather stations near the bridge site by using various statistical methods to estabilish the wind climate model that includes the joint probability between wind speed and wind direction.(3) Topographic model study to investigate the wind characteristics at the bridge site,including mean wind speed, wind turbulence, angle of attack, wind skewness, etc.(4) Aeroelastic model study to determine the wind responses of the bridge and to provide design-orientated data, including structural design wind loads and acceleration assessment. The study involves the establishment of model similarity parameters, the design of the aeroelastic model, and the simulation of large angle of attack in wind tunnel.An approach was also developed to determine the effective static load distributions based on load effects. While the study bridge exhibited sufficient aerodynamic stability in strong winds, considerable dynamic responses were observed as a result of wind buffeting effects.In the assessment of bridge's serviceability performance, the wind-induced bridge motion was considered acceptable in terms of pedestrian safety and comfort criteria.