PREDICTION OF THE WIND-INDUCED FATIGUE OF SLENDER STRUCTURES

A major shortcoming in the structural and wind engineering sectors concerns wind-induced fatigue design and verification procedures. Despite wind-induced fatigue is a critical phenomenon which may lead many slender structures to damage and collapses, suitable engineering and standards procedures are still fragmentary and almost lacking. Structural typologies sensitive to this problem are, for example, wind turbines, bridges, cranes, poles and towers. A method was proposed by one of the authors, which allows to evaluate in closed form the mean damage in the unit time induced by alongwind turbulence effect on steel slender structures or steel structural elements. The procedure is suitable for engineering calculations and code provisions. The present paper describes the more recent advance in generalizing the procedure for determining the wind-induced fatigue damage of slender structures, taking into account simultaneous alongwind and crosswind structural responses due to turbulence and discussing the main analytical features and the simplifying hypotheses adopted. The set of input parameters is coherent with standard format. An application of the proposed generalized procedure to a real case study is reported and discussed, showing the capability of the proposed method to catch the main feature of the fatigue damage phenomenon with quite simple calculation procedure.