• Wind and Structures
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• 제6권5호
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• pp.357-386
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• 2003

A number of methods based on various ideas have been proposed for simulating the non-Gaussian stationary process. However, these methods have some limitations. This paper reviewed several simulation methods based on the translation method using logarithmic and polynomial functions, which have emerged in the history of statistics and in the field of civil engineering. The applicability of each method is discussed from the viewpoint of the reproducibility of higher order statistics of the object function in the simulated sample functions, and examined using pressure signals measured from wind tunnel experiments for various shapes of buildings. The parameter estimation methods, i.e. the method of moments and quantile plot, are also reviewed, and the useful aspects of each method are discussed. Additionally, a simple worksheet for parameter estimation is derived based on the method of moment for practical application, and the accuracy is discussed comparing with a set of previously proposed formulae.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제25권1호
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• pp.63-77
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• 2017

When railway vehicles run by towers of long span bridges, the railway vehicles might experience a sudden load-off and load-on phenomenon in crosswind conditions. To ensure the running safety of the railway vehicles and the running comfort of the passengers, some studies were carried out to investigate the impacts of sudden changes of aerodynamic loads on moving railway vehicles. In the present study, the aerodynamic coefficients which were measured in wind tunnel tests using a moving train model are converted into the aerodynamic coefficients in the actual scale. The three-component aerodynamic loads are calculated based on the aerodynamic coefficients with consideration of the vehicle movement. A three-dimensional railway vehicle model is set up using the multibody dynamic theory, and the aerodynamic loads are treated as the inputs of excitation varied with time for kinetic simulations of the railway vehicle. Thus the dynamic responses of the railway vehicle passing by the bridge tower can be obtained from the kinetic simulations in the time domain. The effects of the mean wind speeds and the rail track positions on the running performance of the railway vehicle are discussed. The three-component aerodynamic loads on the railway vehicle are found to experience significant sudden changes when the vehicle passes by the bridge tower. Correspondingly, such sudden changes of aerodynamic loads have a large impact on the dynamic performance of the running railway vehicle. The dynamic responses of the railway vehicle have great fluctuations and significant sudden changes, which is adverse to the running safety and comfort of the railway vehicle passing by the bridge tower in crosswind conditions.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제22권2호
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• pp.211-234
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• 2016

Super long-span bridges provide people with great convenience, but they also bring traffic safety problems caused by strong wind owing to their high decks. In this paper, the large eddy simulation together with dynamic mesh technology in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to explore the mechanism of a moving vehicle's transient aerodynamic force in crosswind, the regularity and mechanism of the vehicle's aerodynamic forces when it passes through a bridge tower's wake zone in crosswind. By comparing the calculated results and those from wind tunnel tests, the reliability of the methods used in the paper is verified on a moving vehicle's aerodynamic forces in a bridge tower's wake region. A vehicle's aerodynamic force coefficient decreases sharply when it enters into the wake region, and reaches its minimum on the leeward of the bridge tower where exists a backflow region. When a vehicle moves on the outermost lane on the windward direction and just passes through the backflow region, it will suffer from negative lateral aerodynamic force and yaw moment in the bridge tower's wake zone. And the vehicle's passing ruins the original vortex structure there, resulting in that the lateral wind on the right side of the bridge tower does not change its direction but directly impact on the vehicle's windward. So when the vehicle leaves from the backflow region, it will suffer stronger aerodynamic than that borne by the vehicle when it just enters into the region. Other cases of vehicle moving on different lane and different directions were also discussed thoroughly. The results show that the vehicle's pneumatic safety performance is evidently better than that of a vehicle on the outermost lane on the windward.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제12권1호
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• pp.63-76
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• 2009

The vortex-induced vibration of an ${\sqcap}$-shaped bridge deck sectional model is studied in this paper via the wind tunnel experiment. The vibratory behavior of the model shows that there is a transition of the predominant vibration mode from the vertical to the rotational degree of freedom as the wind speed increases gradually or vice versa as the wind speed decreases gradually. The vertical vibration is, however, much weaker in the latter case than in the former. This is a phenomenon which is difficult to model by existing parametric models for vortex-induced vibrations. In order to characterize the aeroelastic property of the ${\sqcap}$-shaped sectional model, a time domain force identification scheme is proposed to identify the time history of the aeroelastic forces. After the application of the proposed method, the resultant fluid forces are re-sampled in dimensionless time domain so that reduced frequency response function (RFRF) can be obtained to explore the properties of the vortex-induced wind forces in reduced frequency domain. The RFRF model is proven effective to characterize the correlation between the wind forces and bridge deck motions, thus can explain the aeroelastic behavior of the ${\sqcap}$-shaped sectional model.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제17권3호
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• pp.245-262
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• 2013

The flow interaction between two identical neighboring twin square prisms in a staggered arrangement in an open terrain was investigated experimentally. The downwind prism was mounted on a rigid-aeroelastic setup in an open-terrain boundary layer flow to measure its acrosswind root-mean-square responses and aerodynamic damping ratios. By varying the relative location of the upwind prism and the Scruton number associated with the downwind prism, the acrosswind aeroelastic behavior of the downwind prism was analyzed and compared to that of an isolated one. Results showed that the acrosswind root-mean-square response of the downwind prism could be either suppressed or enhanced by the wake flow produced by the neighboring upwind prism. Besides the assessment of the wake effect of the downwind prism, finally, regressed relationships were presented to describe the variation of the aerodynamic damping ratio so as to predict its acrosswind fluctuating response numerically.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제2권2호
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• pp.95-104
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• 1999

The dynamic properties of one-span or multi-span reinforced concrete footbridges of catenary form (see e.g., Fig. 1) include the very low fundamental natural frequency, usually near the step-frequency of pedestrians, and the low damping of bending vibrations. The paper summarized the results of model as well as full-scale measurements with particular reference to the influence of torsional rigidity of the stress-ribbon on the magnitude of aerodynamic response, the results of measurements on footbridges of catenary form being completed by results obtained on footbridges of some other types. Additionally the influence of the local broadening of the bridge deck on the bridge response was tested. Starting from these results the criterion has been derived for the decision, whether the flutter analysis is necessary for the design of the footbridge.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제10권5호
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• pp.437-462
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• 2007

A non-translating, long duration thunderstorm downburst has been simulated experimentally and numerically by modelling a spatially stationary steady flow impinging air jet. Velocity profiles were shown to compare well with an upper-bound of velocity measurements reported for full-scale microbursts. Velocity speed-up over a range of topographic features in simulated downburst flow was also tested with comparisons made to previous work in a similar flow, and also boundary layer wind tunnel experiments. It was found that the amplification measured above the crest of topographic features in simulated downburst flow was up to 35% less than that observed in boundary layer flow for all shapes tested. From the computational standpoint we conclude that the Shear Stress Transport (SST) model performs the best from amongst a range of eddy-viscosity and second moment closures tested for modelling the impinging jet flow.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제37권4호
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• pp.303-314
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• 2023

In this study, two steady RANS turbulence models (SST k-ω and Realizable k-ε) and four unsteady turbulence models (URANS SST k-ω and Realizable k-ε, SST-SAS, and SST-IDDES) are evaluated with respect to their capacity to predict crosswind characteristics on high-speed trains (HSTs). All of the numerical simulations are compared with the wind tunnel values and LES results to ensure the accuracy of each turbulence model. Specifically, the surface pressure distributions, time-averaged aerodynamic coefficients, flow fields, and computational cost are studied to determine the suitability of different models. Results suggest that the predictions of the pressure distributions and aerodynamic forces obtained from the steady and transient RANS models are almost the same. In particular, both SAS and IDDES exhibits similar predictions with wind tunnel test and LES, therefore, the SAS model is considered an attractive alternative for IDDES or LES in the crosswind study of trains. In addition, if the computational cost needs to be significantly reduced, the RANS SST k-ω model is shown to provide relatively reasonable results for the surface pressures and aerodynamic forces. As a result, the RANS SST k-ω model might be the most appropriate option for the expensive aerodynamic optimizations of trains using machine learning (ML) techniques because it balances solution accuracy and resource consumption.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제19권5호
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• pp.481-503
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• 2014

A new theoretical model on rain-wind induced vibration (RWIV) of a continuous stay cable is developed in this paper. Different from the existing theoretical analyses in which the cable was modeled as a segmental rigid element, the proposed scheme focuses on the in-plane and out-of-plane responses of a continuous stay cable, which is identical with the prototype cable on cable-stayed bridge. In order to simplify the complexities, the motion law of the rivulet on the cable surface is assumed as a sinusoidal way according to some results obtained from wind tunnel tests. Quasi-steady theory is utilized to determine the aerodynamic forces on the cable. Equations of motion of the cable are derived in a Cartesian Coordinate System and solved by using finite difference method to obtain the in-plane and out-of-plane responses of the cable. The results show that limited cable amplitudes are achieved within a limited range of wind velocity, which is a unique characteristic of RWIV of stay cable. It appears that the in-plane cable amplitude is much larger than the out-of-plane cable amplitude. Rivulet frequency, rivulet distribution along cable axis, and mean wind velocity profile, all have significant effects on the RWIV responses of the prototype stay cable. The effects of damping ratio on RWIVs of stay cables are carefully investigated, which suggests that damping ratio of 1% is needed to well mitigate RWIVs of prototype stay cables.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.209-220
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• 2000

The Strouhal number is an important nondimensional number which is explanatory of aerodynamic instability phenomena. It takes on the different characteristic constant value depending upon the cross-sectional shape of the body being enveloped by the flow. A number of investigations into this subject, especially on the drag test, surface pressure test and hot-wire test, have been carried out under the fixed state of the body in the past. However, almost no investigations concerning the determination of the St on wind-induced vibration of the body have been reported in the past even though the aerodynamic behavior of the body is very important because the construction of wind-sensitive structures is recently on the sharp increase. Based on a series of wind tunnel tests, this paper addresses a new method to determine the Strouhal number of rectangular cylinder in the uniform flow. The central idea of the proposed method is that the Strouhal number can be obtained directly by the aerodynamic behaviors of the body through wind-induced vibration test. The validity of proposed method is evaluated by comparing with the results obtained by previous studies in three B/Ds at attack angle $0^{\circ}$ and a square cylinder with various attack angles. The values and trends of the proposed Strouhal numbers are in good agreements with values of previous studies. And also, the Strouhal numbers of B/D=1.5 and 2.0 with various attack angles are obtained by the proposed method and verified by other method. This proposed method is as good as any other previous methods to obtain the Strouhal number.