Cable Stays Vibration Mitigation by Means of Viscous Dampers Attached to Adjacent Cables

Abstract In the case of cable-stayed bridges with very large spans of over 400m, the common engineering practice at the national level requires the placement of vibration mitigation devices in the form of external dampers (usually of the viscous type). The main disadvantage of this solution is due to the relative positions of these devices along the cable, which are very close to the edge, in a zone where their influence on the cable is minimal. This paper presents a different way of using these devices, by fixing them between adjacent cables. This eliminates the disadvantage presented in the previous paragraph and the efficiency of the device is expected to increase greatly. The paper presents parametric variations of the viscosity of such a device in different scenarios of their positioning along the cables, also correlated with the influence on the cable system’s dynamic response.