Aerodynamic and aero-elastic performances of super-large cooling towers

Hyperbolic thin-shell cooling towers have complicated vibration modes, and are very sensitive to the effects of group towers and wind-induced vibrations. Traditional aero-elastic models of cooling towers are usually designed based on the method of stiffness simulation by continuous medium thin shell materials. However, the method has some shortages in actual engineering applications, so the so-called "equivalent beam-net design method" of aero-elastic models of cooling towers is proposed in the paper and an aero-elastic model with a proportion of 1: 200 based on the method above with integrated pressure measurements and vibration measurements has been designed and carried out in TJ-3 wind tunnel of Tongji university. According to the wind tunnel test, this paper discusses the impacts of self-excited force effect on the surface wind pressure of a large-scale cooling tower and the results show that the impact of self-excited force on the distribution characteristics of average surface wind pressure is very small, but the impact on the form of distribution and numerical value of fluctuating wind pressure is relatively large. Combing with the Complete Quadratic Combination method (hereafter referred to as CQC method), the paper further studies the numerical sizes and distribution characteristics of background components, resonant components, cross-term components and total fluctuating wind-induced vibration responses of some typical nodes which indicate that the resonance response is dominant in the fluctuating wind-induced vibration response and cross-term components are not negligible for wind-induced vibration responses of super-large cooling towers.