Typhoon-induced non-stationary buffeting response of long-span bridges in complex terrain

This paper presents a framework for predicting typhoon-induced non-stationary buffeting response of long-span cable-supported bridges located in a complex terrain. First, a non-stationary typhoon wind model is proposed based on observations from measured typhoon wind data. The wind model includes mainly time-varying mean wind speed, mean wind speed profile and evolutionary power spectral density (EPSD) function. Typhoon-induced wind loading on a bridge deck is then represented by time-varying mean wind forces, non-stationary buffeting forces associated with time-dependent aerodynamic coefficients and self-excited forces characterized by time-dependent aerodynamic derivatives. A nonlinear static analysis is performed to determine time-varying mean wind response, whereas the pseudo excitation method is employed to compute the EPSD-expressed non-stationary buffeting response of a long-span cable-supported bridge. The proposed framework is finally applied to predict non-stationary buffeting responses of a long-span cable-stayed bridge located in a complex terrain during a strong typhoon as a case study. The case study demonstrates how to apply the proposed framework and the results show that the proposed framework is feasible and necessary. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.