Using ALE-VMS to compute wind forces on moving bridge decks

Abstract

A framework for simulating the forced-vibration wind tunnel experiment using stabilized ALE-VMS techniques has been developed. With a user-defined motion of the bridge deck the problem reduces to a flow computation on a moving domain with time-dependent essential boundary conditions. This leads to a coupled problem between the fluid and the fluid mesh, which can be solved very effectively in a block-iterative fashion. An important advantage with the forced-vibration method from a computational point of view is that no steady state response needs to develop. The motion-dependent forces are thus obtained at a low computational cost. Numerical results show good agreement with the experiments.