Analysis and simulation of dynamic response behavior of Scots pine trees to wind loading

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical approach for the decomposition, simulation, and reconstruction of wind-induced stem displacement of plantation-grown Scots pine trees. Results from singular spectrum analysis (SSA) allow a low-dimensional characterization of the complex and complicated tree motion patterns in response to non-destructive wind excitation. Since motion of the sample trees was dominated by sway in the first mode, the application of SSA on time series of sample trees' stem displacement yielded characteristic and distinguishable non-oscillatory trend components, quasi-oscillatory sway, and noise, of which only the non-oscillatory components were correlated directly with wind characteristics. Although sway in the range of the dominant damped fundamental frequency dominated the measured stem displacement signals, it was almost decoupled from near-surface airflow. The ability to discriminate SSA-components is demonstrated based on correlation and spectral analysis. These SSA-components, as well as wind speed measured in the canopy space of the Scots pine forest, were used to train neural networks, which could then reasonably simulate tree response to wind excitation.