Impact of roughness and circularity-defect on bridge cables stability

The stay cables on cable-stayed bridges have been the subject of considerable research in order to understand the origins of the dry galloping phenomenon. Surface irregularity is one of the last parameters that have not been thoroughly examined. This paper focuses on static wind tunnel tests on original High Density Polyethylene cable covers in a range of Reynolds numbers from the sub-critical regime to the critical, corresponding to values ranging from Re = 9.6x104 to Re = 3.3x105. The experiment consists in testing cable covers of various diameters in order to investigate the effect of surface irregularity (roughness and circularity defect) on the mechanism of dry galloping excitation. Previous studies reported that dry galloping is caused by the appearance of a negative pressure bubble on one side of the circular cylinder at the critical Reynolds number range, leading to a rapid drop in the drag coefficient and the appearance of a non-negligible lift force. The results of the present investigation demonstrate that there is a clear correlation between the single bubble pressure pattern and the circularity defect along the tube. They further show that surface roughness has little effect on the location of the bubble. The paper also treats the spatial and temporal correlation of the instantaneous pressure pattern along the tube with respect to the circularity defect.