Abstract Summary
A very slender footbridge across the 32 rails of the central main station with a total length of 240 m had been evaluated for aeroeleastic effects. The drag and lift coefficients and the Strouhal number have been evaluated numerically with RANS. To avoid galloping effects, a certain small damping must be reached. It has been decided to measure the real damping before installing a tuned mass damper. The measurements during construction showed a sufficient damping value, but after completing the bridge better measurements showed a significant smaller value, which would trigger galloping effects. As the installation of tuned mass dampers was not only expensive, but also an issue for the interruption of railway services, a nonlinear wind history analysis has been performed, showing that the accelerations of the oscillations remain within the critical limits for a footbridge.
