The establishment of a numerical model for structural cables including friction

A friction element is presented in this paper. The element was incorporated into a simplified numerical model of cables, which were established by a beam element. A detailed numerical model was implemented based on general-purpose finite element software. Moreover, a flowchart of a numerical analysis was proposed. The accuracy of the proposed numerical model was validated by comparing the results derived in this work to the analytical results derived from Costello's theory and experimental results. The bending performance of 1 × 37 semi-parallel wire cables was investigated. Then, the dynamic response of cable caused by wire break was analyzed. Sensitivity analysis was conducted to investigate the influence of several factors on dynamic response. Results indicated that the friction element proposed in this paper can capture the sliding among different wires and thus can be efficiently adopted in dynamic analysis.