Damping in stay cable with damper: Practical universal damping curve and full-scale measurement

This paper includes two main parts which are the development of a universal damping curve for cables of cable-stayed bridges with dampers and a full-scale measurement of cable damping. In the first part, the universal damping curve is derived for cables with viscous dampers or High Damping Rubber (HDR) dampers. The proposed damping curve is a single curve which incorporates several cable-damper parameters like cable bending stiffness, boundary conditions at cable ends (hinged, fixed or restraint ends), damper stiffness, damper support stiffness and added negative stiffness. A numerical approach by a finite difference method (FDM) is also developed to verify the proposed universal damping curve. In addition to FDM, the accuracy of the proposed curve was confirmed with damping formulations in literature over ten different damper types. The results showed a good agreement of estimated damping between proposed damping curve and others. Additionally, a significant improvement in estimating cable damping was observed through two available full-scale tests, which compared the results between proposed curve and current curve. The second part in this study presents a full-scale measurement of cable vibration and a real application of the proposed damping curve for the identification of damping in cables of Shinminato Bridge (cable lengths from 100 to 200 m). Both HDR and viscous dampers were used for the cable vibration control of the bridge. The results of damping analysis indicated that the HDR damper effectiveness was higher than 0.7 whereas this effectiveness was smaller than 0.4 for the viscous damper.

Automated summary

This paper presents the development of a universal damping curve for cables of cable-stayed bridges with dampers and a full-scale measurement of cable damping. The proposed damping curve is verified using numerical methods and shows good agreement with other damping formulations. The effectiveness of different damper types is also compared.