A numerical and experimental hybrid approach for the investigation of aerodynamic forces on stay cables suffering from rain-wind induced vibration

The aerodynamic forces on a stay cable under a rain-wind induced vibration (RWIV) are difficult to measure directly in a wind tunnel test. This paper presents a hybrid approach that combines an experiment with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the investigation on aerodynamic forces of a stay cable under a RWIV. The stay cable and flow field were considered as two substructures of the system. The oscillation of the stay cable was first measured by using a wind tunnel test of a RWIV under an artificial rainfall condition. The oscillation of the cable was treated as a previously known moving boundary condition and applied to the flow field. Only the flow field with the known moving cable boundary was then numerically simulated by using a CFD method (such as Fluent 6.3). The transient aerodynamic forces of the stay cable with a predetermined cable oscillation were obtained from numerical calculations. The characteristics of the aerodynamic forces in the time domain and frequency domain were then analysed for various cases. To verify the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed hybrid approach, the transient aerodynamic forces were applied to a single-degree-of-freedom model (SDOF) of the stay cable to calculate the RWIV of the cable. A comparison was performed between the oscillation responses of the stay cable obtained from the calculated (SDOF model) and experimental results, and the results indicate that the hybrid approach accurately simulates the transient aerodynamic forces of the stay cable. The equivalent damping ratios induced by the aerodynamic forces were obtained for various wind speeds. Furthermore, a nonlinear model of the aerodynamic force is proposed based on the calculation results, and the coefficients in the model were identified by a nonlinear least-squares technique.