Abstract
The scaling of large structures to investigate their aerodynamics in wind tunnels is a common and robust procedure to estimate important magnitudes, including pressure coefficients. Different aspects can affect the estimation of pressure coefficients; four examples are the non-dimensionalization, blockage, non-stationarity, and non-Gaussianity of the wind tunnel velocity. This paper shows the variability of pressure coefficients due to these four aspects for the case study of a closed box section of a suspended bridge. It was estimated that the pressure coefficients of similar pressure taps vary significantly due to different sets of wind velocity time history used to non-dimensionalize the wind tunnel pressures. In addition, the stationarity of the wind velocity process was not confirmed for all wind velocity sets and the non-Gaussianity of the wind velocity time history was confirmed.
Highlights
Error propagation due to the small scale of experimental models is known to affect results at the prototype scale [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Based on the discussion of the uncertainty [14,15,16,17,18,19] related to the non-dimensionalization of pressure coefficients [20,21], a wind tunnel experimental campaign was proposed for closed box sections of a suspended bridge [22,23,24,25] carried out with the purpose to investigate the suspended bridge instability due to the wind action [26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]
The experimental error related to the estimation of pressure coefficients was investigated based on a case study of a closed box section of a suspended bridge
Summary
Error propagation due to the small scale of experimental models is known to affect results at the prototype scale [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The uncertainty related to the entire process of testing affects results at the prototype scale. The pressure coefficient is non-dimensionalized on the wind tunnel velocity. Based on the discussion of the uncertainty [14,15,16,17,18,19] related to the non-dimensionalization of pressure coefficients [20,21], a wind tunnel experimental campaign was proposed for closed box sections of a suspended bridge [22,23,24,25] carried out with the purpose to investigate the suspended bridge instability due to the wind action [26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34].
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