Aerodynamic vibration of stay cables of a cable-stayed bridge

Cable vibration due to wind has been of interest to many researchers. The wind flow over stay cables may lead to undesirable low frequency high amplitude vibrations of the bridge. The purpose of the research is to study the dynamic behavior of the stay cables of Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge under different wind loading conditions. LS-DYNARTM, explicit finite element software, has been used to simulate the wind loads acting on the stay cables of Bill Emerson Memorial cable-stayed bridge. An analytical model was used to obtain the initial catenary profile of the pre tensioned stay cable due to its own weight. The catenary shape obtained from LS-DYNARTM under gravity loading was verified with the analytical model. LS-DYNARTM provides the option of combining with the FORTRAN subroutine to apply the user-defined loading. This feature was used to duplicate the mean wind speed profiles and also the wind fluctuations that are in agreement with an existing model.;Two approaches for applying wind loading to stay cables were studied. The first was a formulation by Dr. Kewaisy and the second was a formulation recently developed by Dr. Kulak for computing finite element nodal forces from wind loading on stay cables. The advantages of the new formulation over the earlier formulation have been explained in detail. The two formulations are coded in FORTRAN subroutines and have been applied to the finite element model of the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge.