CAD/CAE Integrated Strategy for Nonlinear Dynamics of Suspension Bridges

CAD/CAE platforms progressively gained an important role for various engineering applications, as the increasing number of research in the last two decades shows. The advantages of integrated CAD systems within a structural engineering context have been explored, identifying several aspects of integration to be targeted, as for instance, 2-D drafting and 3-D modelling, graphical and non- graphical design information, CAD data structures and User Interface, and more in general, drafting functions with other engineering applications. For a more complete state of the art we refer to [1], where the authors propose a unified representation, including data management, display and post- processing, and unified data models. At the best of our knowledge, there are no structural analysis tools completely integrated in CAD/CAE platforms; however, there is an increasing interest to use powerful and friendly CAD/CAE softwares to have, especially for complex structures, at least a preliminary design and parametric sensitivity analysis for safety assessment purposes and health monitoring [2]. We propose a numerical strategy for predicting the nonlinear response of suspension bridges subject to aerodynamical loading conditions, directly implemented in Python within a CAD software such as Autodesk Maya, without any external tools. The highly nonlinear behaviour is simulated in computational times that are comparable with the 3D solid generation. The implementation benefits from a theoretical framework which allows us to reduce the fully 3D mechanical problem of the suspension bridge to a beam-like problem accounting for the main nonlinear dynamical features [3, 4]. The same rules governing the theoretical reduction serve as instructions for rendering in 3D data structures the beam response under varying loads. Several numerical examples will be reported in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed code.