Adaptive h-finite element modeling of wind flow around bridges

Design of suspension bridge span is known to be very challenging, particularly considering its stability against wind flow. Traditionally, analysis of bridge section is done using wind tunnel and is very time consuming, with normal experimentation and modeling works requiring minimum 6–8 weeks. To reduce cost and time requirements of wind tunnel experiments, as an alternate approach, wind flow around bridges are investigated by application of computer modeling. One challenging aspect of computational approach is to solve the Navier–Stokes (NS) equations accurately. In the present work, automatic mesh generation technique is used to transfer the continuous fluid flow into discrete numerical data, followed by use of h-adaptive technique. The adaptive simulation is carried out using two posteriori error estimations, which are based on the velocity gradient and vorticity. The current study uses the wind flow over the Great Belt East Bridge (GBEB) as a case study.

► Wind flow around bridges is modeled using h-adaptive finite element procedure.
► Adaptive simulation decreases number of nodes and computation time.
► Flow features are in reasonable comparison with wind tunnel measurement.