Viscous Damping Modelling of Floating Bridge Pontoons With Heaving Skirt and its Impact on Bridge Girder Bending Moments

The current floating bridge concepts of Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen, NPRA) use a flange shape part at the bottom part of the pontoons. The flange is in principle similar to the damping plates used in the offshore industry for SPAR type of structures. The project group initiated the flange part based on the requirement of extra added mass for tuning the bridge system Eigen-modes. Thus, the important modes can be shifted out of the main wave energy zone. The current study will focus on the damping effects of such structure. The damping effects on weak axis bending moment prediction is studied. The modelling of such damping is first proposed according to relevant literature based on both numerical and experimental studies. Since the reference studies were mainly focused on cylindrical structures, it is difficult to obtain an accurate estimation of the damping coefficient for the current bridge pontoon design, which contains a rectangular part between two half-cylindrical parts. In addition, the estimation of pontoon motions needs the input of damping coefficient, which means that the evaluation of damping coefficient is an iteration process. In order to include the uncertainties, a conservative value was adopted to represent the damping effect. The comparison of accounting for the damping effects or not has been given for all the bridge pontoons. The results show that the damping effects are important at the peaks of the responses; in addition, the reduction of the predicted maximum bending moments can be expected around 10–15 percent along different positions of the bridge. However, a further investigation also shows that viscous excitation would increase the bending moments slightly. The comparison also indicates the value of further investigating the effects by CFD or model test methods.