• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.57 no.5
• /
• pp.951-968
• /
• 2016

Long-span cross-strait bridges extending into deep-sea waters are exposed to complex marine environments. During the construction stage, the flexible freestanding bridge towers are more vulnerable to environmental loads imposed by wind and wave loads. This paper presents an experimental investigation on the dynamic responses of a 389-m-high freestanding bridge tower model in a test facility with a wind tunnel and a wave flume. An elastic bridge model with a geometric scale of 1:150 was designed based on Froude similarity and was tested under wind-only, wave-only and wind-wave combined conditions. The dynamic responses obtained from the tests indicate that large deformation under resonant sea states could be a structural challenge. The dominant role of the wind loads and the wave loads change according to the sea states. The joint wind and wave loads have complex effects on the dynamic responses of the structure, depending on the approaching direction angle and the fluid-induced vibration mechanisms of the waves and wind.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.177-201
• /
• 2014

With the increased size and flexibility of the tower and blades, structural vibrations are becoming a limiting factor towards the design of even larger and more powerful wind turbines. Research into the use of vibration mitigation devices in the turbine tower has been carried out but the use of dampers in the blades has yet to be investigated in detail. Mitigating vibrations will increase the design life and hence economic viability of the turbine blades and allow for continual operation with decreased downtime. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of Semi-Active Tuned Mass Dampers (STMDs) in reducing the edgewise vibrations in the turbine blades. A frequency tracking algorithm based on the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) technique is used to tune the damper. A theoretical model has been developed to capture the dynamic behaviour of the blades including the coupling with the tower to accurately model the dynamics of the entire turbine structure. The resulting model consists of time dependent equations of motion and negative damping terms due to the coupling present in the system. The performances of the STMDs based vibration controller have been tested under different loading and operating conditions. Numerical analysis has shown that variation in certain parameters of the system, along with the time varying nature of the system matrices has led to the need for STMDs to allow for real-time tuning to the resonant frequencies of the system.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.197-211
• /
• 2018

The study presents the earthquake performance of the Bosphorus Bridge under multi-point earthquake excitation considering the spatially varying site-specific earthquake motions. The elaborate FE model of the bridge is firstly established depending on the new considerations of the used FEM software specifications, such as cable-sag effect, rigid link and gap elements. The modal analysis showed that singular modes of the deck and the tower were relatively effective in the dynamic behavior of the bridge due to higher total mass participation mass ratio of 80%. The parameters and requirements to be considered in simulation process are determined to generate the spatially varying site-specific ground motions. Total number of twelve simulated ground motions are defined for the multi-support earthquake analysis (Mp-sup). In order to easily implement multi-point earthquake excitation to the bridge, the practice-oriented procedure is summarized. The results demonstrated that the Mp-sup led to high increase in sectional forces of the critical components of the bridge, especially tower base section and tensile force of the main and back stay cables. A close relationship between the dynamic response and the behavior of the bridge under the Mp-sup was also obtained. Consequently, the outcomes from this study underscored the importance of the utilization of the multi-point earthquake analysis and the necessity of considering specifically generated earthquake motions for suspension bridges.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.41 no.5
• /
• pp.681-695
• /
• 2021

Many existing transmission or communication towers designed several decades ago have undergone nonreversible performance degradation, making it hardly meet the additional requirements from upgrades in wind load design codes and extra services of electricity and communication. Therefore, a new-type non-destructive reinforcement method was proposed to reduce the on-site operation of drilling and welding for improving the quality and efficiency of reinforcement. Six built-up steel angle members were tested under compression to examine the reinforcement performance. Subsequently, the cyclic loading test was conducted on a pair of steel angle tower sub-structures to investigate the reinforcement effect, and a simplified prediction method was finally established for calculating the buckling bearing capacity of those new-type retrofitted built-up steel angles. The results indicates that: no apparent difference exists in the initial stiffness for the built-up specimens compared to the unreinforced steel angles; retrofitting the steel angles by single-bolt clamps can guarantee a relatively reasonable reinforcement effect and is suggested for the reduced additional weight and higher construction efficiency; for the substructure test, the latticed substructure retrofitted by the proposed reinforcement method significantly improves the lateral stiffness, the non-deformability and energy dissipation capacity; moreover, an apparent pinching behavior exists in the hysteretic loops, and there is no obvious yield plateau in the skeleton curves; finally, the accuracy validation result indicates that the proposed theoretical model achieves a reasonable agreement with the test results. Accordingly, this study can provide valuable references for the design and application of the non-destructive upgrading project of steel angle towers.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• v.37 no.6
• /
• pp.413-423
• /
• 2023

Wind turbines are usually steel hollow structures that can be vulnerable to dramatic failures due to high-intensity wind (HIW) events, which are classified as a category of localized windstorms that includes tornadoes and downbursts. Analyzing Wind Turbines (WT) under tornadoes is a challenging-to-achieve task because tornadoes are much more complicated wind fields compared with the synoptic boundary layer wind fields, considering that the tornado's 3-D velocity components vary largely in space. As a result, the supporting tower of the wind turbine and the blades will experience different velocities depending on the location of the event. Wind farms also extend over a large area so that the probability of a localized windstorm event impacting one or more towers is relatively high. Therefore, the built-in-house numerical code "HIW-WT" has been developed to predict the straining actions on the blades considering the variability of the tornado's location and the blades' pitch angle. The developed HIWWT numerical model incorporates different wind fields that were generated from developed CFD models. The developed numerical model was applied on an actual wind turbine under three different tornadoes that have different tornadic structure. It is found that F2 tornado wind fields present significant hazard for the wind turbine blades and have to be taken into account if the hazardous impact of this type of unexpected load is to be avoided.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.1-20
• /
• 2010

The recommended factored design wind load effects for overhead lattice transmission line towers by codes and standards are evaluated based on the applicable wind load factor, gust response factor and design wind speed. The current factors and design wind speed were developed considering linear elastic responses and selected notional target safety levels. However, information on the nonlinear inelastic responses of such towers under extreme dynamic wind loading, and on the structural capacity curves of the towers in relation to the design capacities, is lacking. The knowledge and assessment of the capacity curve, and its relation to the design strength, is important to evaluate the integrity and reliability of these towers. Such an assessment was performed in the present study, using a nonlinear static pushover (NSP) analysis and incremental dynamic analysis (IDA), both of which are commonly used in earthquake engineering. For the IDA, temporal and spatially varying wind speeds are simulated based on power spectral density and coherence functions. Numerical results show that the structural capacity curves of the tower determined from the NSP analysis depend on the load pattern, and that the curves determined from the nonlinear static pushover analysis are similar to those obtained from IDA.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.217-226
• /
• 2017

This paper summarizes the structural concept and design of the "Nakanoshima Festival Tower West" in Osaka, Japan, which is 200m high and has a super-high damping system. Its superstructure is mainly composed of a central core and outer tube frames. It has a bottom truss structure at the boundary between the low-rise and mid-rise sections of the building, where the column arrangement is changed. Besides, the high-rise section of the building has a neck truss structure. These truss structures smoothly transfer the axial forces of the columns and reduce the flexural deformations induced by horizontal loads. Oil dampers with extremely high damping capacity are installed in the rigid walls named the "Big Wall Frames" of the low-rise section. Moreover, many braces and damping devices are well arranged in the center core of each story. The damping effects of these devices ensure that all structural members are remain within the elastic range and that story drifts are within 1/150 in large earthquakes. This super-high damping structure in the low-rise section is named the "Damping Layer". The whole structural system is named the "Super Damping Structure". The whole structural systems enhance the building's safety, comfort and Business Continuity Planning (BCP) under large earthquakes.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.21 no.5
• /
• pp.963-980
• /
• 2016

The jib system with middle strut is widely used to achieve the large arm length in the large scale tower crane and the deployability in the mobile construction crane. In this paper, an analytical solution for the out-of-plane buckling of the jib system with middle strut is proposed. To obtain the analytical expression of the buckling characteristic equation, the method of differential equation was adopted by establishing the bending and torsional differential equation of the jib system under the instability critical state. Compared with the numerical solutions of the finite element software ANSYS, the analytical results in this work agree well with them. Therefore, the correctness of the results in this work can be confirmed. Then the influences of the lateral stiffness of the cable fixed joint, the dip angle of the strut, the inertia moment of the strut, and the horizontal position of the cable fixed joint on the out-of-plane buckling behavior of the jib system were investigated.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.10 no.4_5
• /
• pp.485-499
• /
• 2012

Mode shape expansion is useful in structural dynamic studies such as vibration based structural health monitoring; however most existing expansion methods can not consider the modelling errors in the finite element model and the measurement uncertainty in the modal properties identified from vibration data. This paper presents a reliable approach for expanding mode shapes with consideration of both the errors in analytical model and noise in measured modal data. The proposed approach takes the perturbed force as an unknown vector that contains the discrepancies in structural parameters between the analytical model and tested structure. A regularisation algorithm based on the Tikhonov solution incorporating the L-curve criterion is adopted to reduce the influence of measurement uncertainties and to produce smooth and optimised expansion estimates in the least squares sense. The Canton Tower benchmark problem established by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is then utilised to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed expansion approach to the actual structure. The results from the benchmark problem studies show that the proposed approach can provide reliable predictions of mode shape expansion using only limited information on the operational modal data identified from the recorded ambient vibration measurements.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.10 no.4_5
• /
• pp.427-442
• /
• 2012

An effective approach for updating finite element model is presented which can provide reliable estimates for structural updating parameters from identified operational modal data. On the basis of the dynamic perturbation method, an exact relationship between the perturbation of structural parameters such as stiffness change and the modal properties of the tested structure is developed. An iterative solution procedure is then provided to solve for the structural updating parameters that characterise the modifications of structural parameters at element level, giving optimised solutions in the least squares sense without requiring an optimisation method. A regularization algorithm based on the Tikhonov solution incorporating the generalised cross-validation method is employed to reduce the influence of measurement errors in vibration modal data and then to produce stable and reasonable solutions for the structural updating parameters. The Canton Tower benchmark problem established by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed model updating technique. The results from the benchmark problem studies show that the proposed technique can successfully adjust the reduced finite element model of the structure using only limited number of frequencies identified from the recorded ambient vibration measurements.