Numerical Ward-Type Tornado Simulator and its Application to Transient Wind-Induced Response of Long-Span Bridges

Abstract

<p>In this study, the tornado-like wind field is simulated by the numerical Ward-type tornado simulator based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. To minimize the discrepancy between the simulated and field-measured tornado winds, the optimization strategy is developed to achieve optimal parameters of the numerical Ward-type tornado simulator, namely the inflow angle and translation speed. To facilitate the optimization process, a multi-fidelity surrogate model is utilized to effectively integrate both low-fidelity and high-fidelity data for accurate and efficient simulations. The “best” parameters based on the multi-fidelity surrogate model is input to the numerical Ward- type tornado simulator (using LES technique). Finally, the transient wind field generated using the validated numerical Ward-type tornado simulator is employed as the dynamic inputs to the finite element (FE) model of a long-span bridge.</p>