Buffeting analysis of a suspension bridge under construction based on adjacent wind field data

Abstract

Buffeting analysis of long-span suspension bridge has received considerable attention in the past decades. In current practice, it is challenging to determine the wind turbulence spectrum at bridge site accurately if the field measured wind data is insufficient. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework for bridge buffeting responses evaluation. The framework first proposes an approach based on long short-term memory (LSTM) network to compose long term data on wind characteristics for estimating the wind turbulence spectrum at bridge site via leveraging the wind field data acquired from the long-term monitoring data at adjacent locations (e.g., nearby meteorological station and bridges). Afterwards, the obtained wind spectrum at bridge site will be utilized for the buffeting analysis. To demonstrate the usage and performance of the proposed framework, a long-span cross-sea suspension bridge under construction is used throughout the paper as an example to investigate the buffeting-induced responses. The analysis results show that buffeting responses are significantly affected by wind speed and the identified bridge frequencies are consistent with the design frequencies.