Hydroelastic analysis of a floating bridge under spatially inhomogeneous waves, with emphasis on the effect of drift force modeling

Abstract

The pontoon-supported floating bridge is an alternative concept for crossing a fjord with a width of up to 5 km. Due to the huge span, the first two natural periods of the bridge are more than 60 s, indicating that the corresponding modes can be excited by slowly-varying drift forces on the pontoons. A simplified approach for determining the drift forces is to assume that the pontoons are independent of the floating bridge, i.e., fixed or freely floating. However, the first-order motions of the pontoons, which are restricted by the deformation of the floating bridge, have a significant effect on the drift forces. To evaluate the uncertainties implied by the simplification of drift forces, in this study, a second-order beam-connected-discrete-modules (BCDM) hydroelastic method is adopted to assess the effect of different drift force models on the floating bridge. In this method, the first-order response amplitude operators (RAOs) of bridge-restricted pontoons are first solved in the frequency-domain. Based on the RAOs, the mean drift forces for each pontoon are then determined by using potential theory. Considering the spatial inhomogeneity of the wave field, the time series of the first- and second-order wave forces are generated by using the linear transfer functions and Newman’s approximation, respectively. Then, the method is applied to investigate the hydroelastic responses of a straight side-anchored floating bridge for the crossing site of Bjørnafjord. The results show that the horizontal displacement is very sensitive to the different force models implied by various pontoon boundary conditions, i.e., free, fixed, and bridge-restricted. The drift forces on the bridge-restricted pontoons are approximately 10%–20% larger than those for the fixed pontoons. Moreover, wave inhomogeneity results in increased vertical displacements and weak axis bending moments.