Passive Control System for Mitigation of Longitudinal Buffeting Responses of a Six-Tower Cable-Stayed Bridge

This paper presents an investigation of mitigation of longitudinal buffeting responses of the Jiashao Bridge, the longest multispan cable-stayed bridge in the world. A time-domain procedure for analyzing buffeting responses of the bridge is implemented in ANSYS with the aeroelastic effect included. The characteristics of longitudinal buffeting responses of the six-tower cable-stayed bridge are studied in some detail, focusing on the effects of insufficient longitudinal stiffness of central towers and partially longitudinal constraints between the bridge deck and part of bridge towers. The effectiveness of viscous fluid dampers on the mitigation of longitudinal buffeting responses of the bridge is further investigated and a multiobjective optimization design method that uses a nondominating sort genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is used to optimize parameters of the viscous fluid dampers. The results of the parametric investigations show that, by appropriate use of viscous fluid dampers, the top displacements of central towers and base forces of bridge towers longitudinally restricted with the bridge deck can be reduced significantly, with hampering the significant gain achieved in the base forces of bridge towers longitudinally unrestricted with the bridge deck. And the optimized parameters for the viscous fluid dampers can be determined from Pareto-optimal fronts using the NSGA-II that can satisfy the desired performance requirements.