Vibration control of stress ribbon bridges subjected to moving vehicles

Abstract

Stress ribbon bridges experience excessive vibration when subjected to moving vehicles due to flexibility and low damping, affecting the running safety and ride comfort of the vehicles. It is of great challenge to suppress the vibration of a vehicle-stress ribbon bridge (VSRB) system because of the strong geometric nonlinearity of the stress ribbon bridge, which might also lead to the inapplicability of the conventional optimal design of tuned mass dampers (TMD). This paper proposes an eddy-current tuned mass damper (ECTMD) and its parameter optimization method for suppressing the excessive vibration of stress ribbon bridges subjected to moving vehicles. A dynamic analysis method of the VSRB system is first presented for evaluating the control performance of the ECTMD. Then, a response surface method is proposed to optimize the parameters of the ECTMD for improving control performance. The control performance of the ECTMD optimized by the proposed procedure is validated using a numerical study of a real stress ribbon bridge. Numerical results demonstrate that the conventional design methodology of the TMD based on the linear theory is not the optimal design for the VSRB system due to its nonlinear vibration feature, whereas the proposed response surface method well optimizes the ECTMD's parameters, thus achieving the optimal control performance. This study provides an effective passive control approach for reducing the dynamic responses of stress ribbon bridges excited by moving vehicles.