Modeling and simulation of bridge-section buffeting response in turbulent flow

Abstract

Buffeting analysis plays an important role in the wind-resistant design of long-span bridges. While computational methods have been widely used in the study of self-excited forces on bridge sections, there is very little work on applying advanced simulation to buffeting analysis. In an effort to address this shortcoming, we developed a framework for the buffeting simulation of bridge sections subjected to turbulent flows. We carry out simulations of a rectangular bridge section with aspect ratio 10 and compute its aerodynamic admittance functions. The simulations show good agreement with airfoil theory and experimental observations. It was found that inflow turbulence plays an important role in obtaining accurate wind loads on the bridge sections. The proposed methodology is envisioned to have practical impact in wind engineering of structures in the future.

ALE-VMS methods for wind-resistant design of long-span bridges

“…Incident turbulence is generated using the MDM-method of [29]. MDM was first proposed in [30] and can be viewed as a generalization of auxiliary recycling methods of which early formulations for turbulence modeling are reported in [45,46].…”

“…wind turbines [21], flapping wings [22], turbo-machinery [23], tire aerodynamics [24], channel flow [25], and also bridge aerodynamics [26][27][28][29]. Other key ingredients of the computational framework utilized in this work are the Multi-Domain Modeling (MDM) extension [30,31] for simulation of incident turbulence, the weakly-enforced boundary conditions [32] for relaxing the no-slip boundary condition at solid surfaces, and Jacobian-based stiffening mesh-moving algorithms [33].…”

“…To demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of these methods towards practical wind engineering of bridge structures, we undertake well-known and thoroughly studied bridge sections and present an overview of the major tasks of flutter and buffeting analysis, also studied in our previous works [26][27][28][29]. We also present new results and applications on multi-mode flutter, the impact of incident turbulence on the aerodynamic derivatives, admittance functions, span-wise coherence of turbulence and VIV, some of which related to issues raised in earlier literature.…”

New insight into multilevel local refinement in adaptive isogeometric analysis

“…Higher order continuity and exact geometry representation of CAD basis functions have shown superior solution accuracy of IGA compared with the traditional C 0 FEA. In this way, many researchers have implemented the IGA in various classes of problems, that is, fluid mechanics, [3][4][5][6] fluid-structure interaction, [7][8][9] optimization, [10][11][12][13] shell problems, 14,15 and cracks. [16][17][18][19][20] However, a drawback of NURBS basis functions stems from their tensor-product structure which prohibits a truly local refinement in multidimensional analysis.…”

Determination of complex aerodynamic admittance of bridge decks under deterministic gusts using the Vortex Particle Method

“…Unlike the static wind coefficients and flutter derivatives, the aerodynamic admittance has been rarely determined by utilizing CFD. To the authors' knowledge, very few studies exist that obtain the aerodynamic admittance with the grid-based CFD methods (e.g., Uejima et al (2008); Turbelin and Gibert (2001); Bruno et al (2004); Helgedagsurd et al (2019)).…”