Tuned Liquid Damping of an oscillating bridge deck portion during construction

Abstract

The effectiveness of Tuned Liquid Dampers (TLD) on a bridge deck in the lifting phase against flutter instability is presented. The following study represents an experimental investigation. A linear analytical approach was used for predimensioning the TLD. Based on that, TLDs were built and tested on a shaking table. The experimental results were not in good agreement with the analytical method therefore new tanks were constructed in order to conduct the experiment in the wind tunnel. A scaled model of the deck of Bosphorus Bridge is analyzed as an illustrative example. The effectiveness of the TLD system in increasing the critical flutter speed of the deck is investigated through a parametric study, which led to the optimization of paramaters such as height of water or position of the water tanks which provide maximum critical wind speed for the deck section. The result of the experiment shows that the critical flutter velocity is increased compared to the deck alone, but the tuning condition is not obtained since the tanks filled with water exhibit an in-phase motion with the deck. This study may open a broad range of questions regarding the utilisation of unconventional techniques for this particular problem and different solutions may be tested and adopted given the variety of available techniques.