Variability of measured modal frequencies of a cable-stayed bridge under different wind conditions

A good understanding of normal modal variability of civil structures due to varying environmental conditions such as temperature and wind is important for reliable performance of vibration-based damage detection methods. This paper addresses the quantification of wind-induced modal variability of a cable-stayed bridge making use of one-year monitoring data. In order to discriminate the wind-induced modal variability from the temperature-induced modal variability, the one-year monitoring data are divided into two sets: the first set includes the data obtained under weak wind conditions (hourly-average wind speed less than 2 m/s) during all four seasons, and the second set includes the data obtained under both weak and strong (typhoon) wind conditions during the summer only. The measured modal frequencies and temperatures of the bridge obtained from the first set of data are used to formulate temperature-frequency correlation models by means of artificial neural network technique. Before the second set of data is utilized to quantify the wind-induced modal variability, the effect of temperature on the measured modal frequencies is first eliminated by normalizing these modal frequencies to a reference temperature with the use of the temperature-frequency correlation models. Then the wind-induced modal variability is quantitatively evaluated by correlating the normalized modal frequencies for each mode with the wind speed measurement data. It is revealed that in contrast to the dependence of modal frequencies on temperature, there is no explicit correlation between the modal frequencies and wind intensity. For most of the measured modes, the modal frequencies exhibit a slightly increasing trend with the increase of wind speed in statistical sense. The relative variation of the modal frequencies arising from wind effect (with the maximum hourly-average wind speed up to 17.6 m/s) is estimated to range from 1.61 % to 7.87% for the measured 8 modes of the bridge, being notably less than the modal variability caused by temperature effect.