An efficient space-time based simulation approach of wind velocity field with embedded conditional interpolation for unevenly spaced locations

The classical spectral representation method (SRM) has been extensively used in the simulation of multivariate stationary Gaussian random processes. Due to the application of fast Fourier transform (FFT), the simulation is usually efficient. However, for processes with a large number of simulation points, it becomes necessary to enhance the simulation efficiency. One example is the wind velocity field along a large-span bridge, where hundreds of wind velocity fluctuations are required. In the case of bridges built over a homogeneous terrain such as coastal area or flat plain, the wind velocity field can be modeled as a multivariate homogeneous random process i.e., the auto power spectral densities (PSDs) at evenly spaced simulation points are same and the cross PSD is a function of separation distance between two simulation points. Furthermore, in some applications, additional simulation points need to be included to a set of uniformly distributed points in order to make the wind velocity field consistent to the structural dynamic analysis requirement. In this paper, a hybrid approach of space-time random-field based SRM and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD)-based interpolation is developed for simulating the above wind velocity process. In this approach, the random-field based SRM is used to simulate the multivariate homogeneous random process composed of a set of uniformly distributed simulation locations while POD-based interpolation is used to conditionally generate the wind velocities at a few unevenly distributed points using the previously simulated wind velocities. The idea of the former is based on transforming the simulation of the homogeneous random process into that of the corresponding space-time random field where the phase angle is assumed to be zero and the coherence function must be an even function in terms of separation distance. Through this procedure, customary requirement for spectral matrix decomposition is eliminated and application of two dimensional EFT can improve the simulation efficiency dramatically. The shortcomings of this method include a slight approximation regarding the simulated sample and the non-ergodicity for the correlation function. The numerical example of a homogeneous wind velocity field along a bridge deck shows that the proposed random field-based method is very efficient in terms of accuracy and efficiency when the number of simulation locations is large and the POD-based interpolation also has good performance. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.