Identification of aerodynamic parameters for eccentric bridge section model

The equations of motion for bridge deck section model elastically suspended in wind tunnel are formulated about mass center of the system using the Lagrangian approach, accommodating both the elasticity and damping eccentricities in the formulation. The Subsection Extended-Order Iterative Least Square (SEO-ILS) algorithm is developed in the state space for direct identification of system matrices from free vibration data of section model obtained from wind tunnel testing. The flutter derivatives can be extracted straightforwardly from the difference in the system matrices identified at zero wind velocity and at a specific wind velocity, respectively. By making use of complex modal decomposition technique, a procedure is employed to correct the system matrix at zero wind velocity considering both eccentricities. The proposed method is applied to identify the flutter derivatives of a thin plate section model and the section model of a suspension bridge. The results show a favorable agreement between the flutter derivatives of a thin plate obtained with the proposed method and those derived from the analytic formulae. The identified direct flutter derivatives of the suspension bridge section model also are in good agreements with those obtained using Scanlan's method. It is shown that the use of the corrected system matrix at zero wind velocity leads to better accuracy in identifying the flutter derivatives especially at high reduced wind velocity than using the original system matrix, and the eccentricity is found to have more influence on the cross flutter derivatives than on the direct flutter derivatives.