Numerical simulation of turbulent fluctuations along the axis of a bridge

There are many potential applications where it would be useful to digitally generate the turbulent wind velocity time histories in the wind engineering study. One of the widely used numerical techniques for wind field simulation is the spectral representation method. However, the main drawback of this method is being computationally expensive for the multivariate and multidimensional processes problems. In this paper, a modified spectral representation method is proposed specifically for generation of the turbulent fluctuations along a bridge deck at the same elevation. The proposed method does not require decomposition of the spectral density matrix, thus it is more efficient than the original spectral representation method. As an example, the method is applied to the simulation of the wind field for a long-span suspension bridge. A comparison of the simulated covariance functions with their target functions is also included. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.