Aerostructural Optimization of Long Span Bridges: Current Advances and Challenges

Structures Congress 2020. 5-8 abril, 2020. St. Louis, Missouri [Abstract] This paper describes the evolution of deck shape of long span bridges since the Tacoma Narrows collapse trying to avoid undesirable aerodynamic behavior under wind flow and the trend in the last decades to increase the length of the main span of suspension and cable stayed bridges. The necessity to use advanced technologies to help the engineer to obtain the best possible design is highlighted and the advantages of applying optimization methodologies is encouraged. It is explained that this approach requires to use only numerical tools and hence to eliminate experimental studies, as wind tunnel tests using reduced models of full bridge of a segment of the deck, and their substitution by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. After doing so, the current capabilities of this approach are presented and, finally, the problems that need to be solved to have a fully operational methodology able to be implemented in real structures are outlined. This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in the frame of the research project BIA2016-76656-R and the Galician regional government (including FEDER Funding) reference ED431C 2017/72. M. Cid Montoya has been funded by the Galician regional government (Xunta de Galicia) with reference ED481B 2018/053 and the Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship program Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/72 Xunta de Galicia; ED481B 2018/053