A new approach to aerostatic analysis of long-span bridges

Long-span bridges are prone to wind-induced response, and aerostatic analysis is a very important tool for predicting their behaviours under strong wind conditions. While there are many powerful commercial finite-element analysis software packages, the aerostatic stability analysis of long-span bridges cannot be conducted by using these packages because of the dependency of wind loading on the deformation of the bridge structure. To obtain accurate aerostatic analysis results, the effect of this type of 'load non-linearity' must be taken into account, and therefore special in-house computer programs are often required. This paper introduces a novel approach to the aerostatic stability analysis of bridge structures and presents a new algorithm based on the new approach. A commercial software package is chosen as the analysis engine and is integrated with new modules developed through application program interface (API). The aerostatic stability analysis of Hong Kong Ting Kau Bridge is conducted using this algorithm, illustrating the effectiveness of this approach. The new approach is expected to be applicable to other types of advanced analyses of structures.