A unified approach to aerodynamic damping and drag/lift instabilities, and its application to dry inclined cable galloping

Inclined cables of cable-stayed bridges often experience large amplitude vibrations. One of the potential excitation mechanisms is dry inclined cable galloping, which has been observed in wind tunnel tests but which has not previously been fully explained theoretically. In this paper, a general expression is derived for the quasi-steady aerodynamic damping (positive or negative) of a cylinder of arbitrary cross-section yawed/inclined to the flow, for small amplitude vibrations in any plane. The expression covers the special cases of conventional quasi-steady aerodynamic damping, Den Hartog galloping and the drag crisis, as well as dry inclined cable galloping. A nondimensional aerodynamic damping parameter governing this behaviour is proposed, which is a function of only the Reynolds number, the angle between the wind velocity and the cable axis, and the orientation of the vibration plane. Measured static force coefficients from wind tunnel tests have been used with the theoretical expression to predict values of this parameter. Two main areas of instability (i.e. negative aerodynamic damping) have been identified, both in the critical Reynolds number region, one of which was previously observed in separate wind tunnel tests on a dynamic cable model. The minimum values of structural damping required to prevent dry inclined cable galloping are defined, and other factors in the behaviour in practice are discussed. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.