Effect of bending stiffness on the in-plane free vibration characteristics of a cable network

Abstract

Stay cables of cable-stayed bridges are connected by cross-ties to form a cable network, or the slings of the same suspension points on a suspension bridge are connected by vibration absorbers to form a sling network. As a result, the cable network’s in-plane free vibration characteristics are different from independent, single cables. However, stay cables or slings have certain bending stiffnesses, which directly affect the cable network’s free vibration characteristics. Therefore, to clarify the real dynamic behavior of a cable network and to improve the accuracy of cable network measurements, a multi-node, cross-tied, multilayer beam analytical model that considers the bending stiffness is proposed. The system equilibrium equation is established and the free vibration frequencies and modes of the system are obtained by analytical algorithm. Then, numerical simulations and field experiments, are carried out to verify the analytical results. In addition, parameter analyses with different configurations are performed on a multilayer stay-cable network and on a double-layer sling network to study the influence of bending stiffness on the cable network’s free vibration characteristics with different parameters.