Fluctuating wind load encountered by linearly moving vehicles: Investigation on fluctuating wind spectral characteristics

Wind load is one of the controlling loads for moving vehicles. Existing studies on the wind-induced response of vehicles mostly apply traditional wind spectra directly to the vehicles, overlooking their motion status. Fluctuating wind characteristics encountered by linearly moving vehicles were investigated in this paper. The traditional static frame of view was adjusted to a moving one, two principal flow directions were considered and the idea of positional equivalence introduced in Taylor frozen assumption was extended to the moving direction. A fluctuating wind power spectral density (PSD) was proposed. Then a novel test was designed to enable a measuring probe to travel across a wind field. The fluctuating wind characteristics encountered by moving points are quite different from those encountered by a static point. The integral scale decreases as the speed ratio of the measuring point to the wind increases, and an elliptic model was suggested. The proposed PSD aligns well with the test results, indicating that it can be used to accurately characterize the fluctuating wind load encountered by moving vehicles. Both the test results and the numerical analysis showed that as the speed ratio increases, the PSD and energy spectrum as a whole migrate to higher frequencies.