The fatigue life analysis of a long-span suspension bridge under long-term environmental wind action

To analyze the buffeting fatigue of the long-span suspension bridge under the environmental wind action, the wind field monitoring system was installed on a long-span suspension bridge in the East China Sea and the long-term wind speeds were collected. Based on two years experimental results, the distributions of wind speed at different wind directions were discussed; also the time-domain fatigue analysis method considering the wind direction effect was proposed based on the wind speed decomposition. The suspension bridge in the East China Sea is analyzed in detail and the results indicate that the fatigue wind speed can be well fitted by Weibull distribution. The stiffening girder's fatigue is very sensitive to the wind speed and the role of strong winds should be taken seriously, the bridge's buffeting fatigue life is much longer than the bridge's structural design life of 100 years according to the probability of occurrence and duration of the wind speed in different directions.