Aplicación de métodos computacionales en la evaluación de la respuesta aeroelástica de puentes soportados por cables

The possibilities of computational methods for assessing the response of cable supported bridges underwind action are considered in this work. The main objective is to study the possibilities of substitutingwind tunnel campaigns by computer based analyses, particularly at the early design stage. The prelimi-nary proposed design for a continuous cable-stayed bridge with two main spans of 650 m and a single boxgirder deck has been considered as a case study. The force coefficients of the deck cross-section have beencomputed and the unsteady response associated to vortex-shedding has been simulated using CFD com-mercial software. Furthermore, an in-house piece of software has been employed to obtain the responsefor flutter and buffeting phenomena adopting the hybrid approach; with that purpose the experimentalflutter functions of a similar box girder deck were adopted. The computational results have been validatedby comparison with similar experimental results published by other researchers. It has been verified thatthe set of adopted methods offers reliable results with moderate costs; therefore, the proposed approachis very suitable at the early design stage of long span bridges or at conceptual design works.