Study on vortex-induced multimodal coupled vibration of arch bridge suspenders

The objective of this paper was to investigate the 2-DOF suspender response under the condition of vortex-induced force and reveal the multimodal coupling mechanism. Firstly, an elastically mounted segmental model of suspender was established. Wind tunnel experiments were conducted to obtain the time history displacement signals in cross-flow and in-line directions, the empirical parameters were obtained by identify those signals. The nonlinear partial differential motion equation of suspender with two degrees of freedom was established based on Hamilton's principle, which considered the dynamic strain, bending stiffness and vortex-induced force of suspender. The Galerkin method was used to discretize the nonlinear partial differential equations into nonlinear motion governing equations, which considered the first three order modes. A numerical method was used to solve the motion governing equation, the time history displacement curve, phase diagram, amplitude spectrum and Poincare map of the multi-modal responses in the cross-flow and in-line directions were obtained. With the weak coupling effect of nonlinear stiffness and vortex-induced force, the cross-flow and in-line responses demonstrate period doubling bifurcation, quasi-periodic vibration, period doubling vibration, crises and transient chaotic phenomena. However, with the strong coupling effect, the crises and transient chaos in response amplitude disappear. More importantly, planar/non-planar multimodal internal resonance were found in this work. With the weak multimodal coupling effect in suspender response, the low-order modal response is dominant; as the multimodal coupling effect increases, the high -order modal response becomes predominant. In addition, the system energy not only transfers from high-order modal response to low-order modal response, but also the system energy transfer from low-order modal response to high-order modal response. These conclusions are useful for the design and practical engineering of suspenders, which have high theoretical research value in understanding the mechanism of multimodal coupling effects on suspender response.