Direct measurements of buffeting wind forces on bridge decks

Direct measurements of the forces induced by the buffeting action of wind on a motionless bridge deck have been carried out at the Danish Maritime Institute. The wind tunnel experiments aimed at defining the spatial distribution of the wind loading as a function of the deck width and the scales of the incident turbulence. This paper presents the main findings of the experiments and illustrates the impetus behind this research which was to evaluate, for closed-box girder bridge decks, the error margin of the wind load predictions based on the strip assumption. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.