Investigation on spanwise coherence of buffeting forces acting on bridges with bluff body decks

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In the traditional buffeting response analysis method, the spanwise incomplete correlation of buffeting forces is always assumed to be same as that of the incident wind turbulence and the action of the signature turbulence is ignored. In this paper, three typical bridge decks usually adopted in the real bridge engineering, a single flat box deck, a central slotted box deck and a two-separated paralleled box deck, were employed as the investigated objects. The wind induced pressure on these bridge decks were measured via a series of wind tunnel pressure tests of the sectional models. The influences of the wind speed in the tests, the angle of attack, the turbulence intensity and the characteristic distance were taken into account and discussed. The spanwise root coherence of buffeting forces was also compared with that of the incidence turbulence. The signature turbulence effect on the spanwise root coherence function was decomposed and explained by a new empirical method with a double-variable model. Finally, the formula of a sum of rational fractions that accounted for the signature turbulence effect was proposed in order to fit the results of the spanwise root coherence function. The results show that, the spanwise root coherence of the drag force agrees with that of incidence turbulence in some range of the reduced frequency but disagree in the mostly reduced frequency. The spanwise root coherence of the lift force and the torsional moment is much larger than that of the incidence turbulence. The influences of the wind speed and the angle of attack are slight, and they can be ignored in the wind tunnel test. The spanwise coherence function often involves several narrow peaks due to the signature turbulence effect in the high reduced frequency zone. The spanwise coherence function is related to the spanwise separation distance and the spanwise integral length scales, and the signature turbulence effect is related to the deck-width-related reduced frequency.