Exact Dynamic Analysis of Shallow Sagged Cable System — Theory and Experimental Verification

Abstract

With the increase of the span and height of modern engineering structures, the design length of engineering cables is increasing while the structural form is becoming more complicated, whose dynamic problem has become the key to structural design, performance monitoring and maintenance and vibration control. Therefore, it is necessary to study and develop a unified dynamic analysis theory for complex cable system with high calculation accuracy and efficiency to meet the requirements of exact analysis of engineering structures. In view of this, a unified dynamic analysis method for shallow sagged cable system is proposed in this paper based on the dynamic stiffness method. Since the derivation process is given in analytical form, the calculation accuracy and efficiency are promoted greatly. Full-scale cable test and numerical cases are used to verify the accuracy of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method is in good agreement with the measured results and can effectively overcome the “root-missing” phenomenon existing in conventional iteration methods when solving the transcendental frequency equation.