Numerical simulation of buffeting response of long-span bridges in time-domain using Volterra based wind load model

Abstract

This paper compares the buffeting response of a suspension bridge simulated in time-domain with full-scale measurement data. First, the buffeting and self-excited forces are formulated in terms of indicial functions (IFs) using convolution based linear unsteady and Volterra series based nonlinear unsteady wind models. Then, first and second-orders IFs are identified using experimental data. Subsequently, a turbulent wind field is simulated for full bridge using spectral theory. At last, a numerical example of a 3D suspension bridge model is presented. The time-history dynamic analysis results show that a good agreement in the buffeting response is obtained between numerical simulation results and measurement data. It also highlights the efficacy of proposed time-domain method to predict the buffeting response accurately.