The impact of circularity defects on bridge stay cable dry galloping stability

The present work studies the influence of circularity defects, on the aerodynamic behaviour of stay cables of cable-stayed bridges. It focuses on wind tunnel tests on High-Density Polyethylene cable covers with and without helical fillets, in a range of Reynolds numbers from the sub-critical to the critical regime. The paper considers the impact of circularity defects on the aerodynamic stability of cable sheaths by testing various amplitudes of imposed ovalization. The defects are artificially applied on real sheaths whose original cross-sections are close to circular. The experiment consists in measuring surface pressures to investigate how the amplitude of ovalization influences the flow around the sheaths, especially in the critical Reynolds number regime when transition in the boundary layer occurs. The analysis is based on bifurcation diagrams and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition. The investigation demonstrates that important circularity defects can significantly increase the bi-stable nature of the flow around a sheath at the critical regime. Nevertheless, the introduction of a helical fillet de-correlates the flow around the sheath, causing jumps in lift that have different sign along its length.