Long-term monitoring of super-long stay cables on a cable-stayed bridge

For a long cable-stayed bridge, stay cables are its most important load-canying components. In this paper, long-term monitoring of super-long stay cables of Sutong Bridge is introduced. A comprehensive data analysis procedure is presented, in which time domain and frequency domain based analyses are carried out. In time domain, the vibration data of several long stay cables are firstly analyzed and the standard deviation of the acceleration of stay cables, and its variation with time are obtained, as well as the relationship between in-plane vibration and out-plane vibration. Meanwhile, some vibrations such as wind and rain induced vibration are detected. Through frequency domain analysis, the basic frequencies of the stay cables are identified. Furthermore, the axial forces and their statistical parameters are acquired. To investigate the vibration deflection, an FFT-based decomposition method is used to get the modal deflection. In the end, the relationship between the vibration amplitude of stay cables and the wind speed is investigated based on correlation analysis. Through the adopted procedure, some structural parameters of the stay cables have been derived, which can be used for evaluating the component performance and corresponding management of stay cables.