State-of-the-art review on typhoon wind environments and their effects on long-span bridges

After more than 40 years of economic reforms, the Chinese economy has rapidly developed, and large populations and wealth have been concentrated around the southeastern Chinese coastline where, unfortunately, typhoons frequently occur. Many long-span bridges are potentially threatened by wind hazards. Owing to special spiral wind fields and mesoscale localized strong wind features, typhoon-induced wind has created several new challenges when analyzing wind engineering for long-span bridges. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art research on the typhoon wind field characteristics and typhoon-induced structural responses of long-span bridges, including the following four aspects. First, typhoon hazard simulation techniques, including full-track methods and typhoon wind field models, are outlined in chronological order. Second, typhoon turbulence characteristics, including nonstationarity, non-Gaussian forces, strong turbulence intensity and nonsynoptic spectra, are presented. Third, advanced actively controlled multiple-fan and airfoil cascade wind tunnels and computational fluid dynamics are employed to simulate a typhoon field. Fourth, typhoon wind-induced long-span bridge buffeting analysis methods for considering nonstationary and non-Gaussian features are introduced. Finally, several prospective research areas concerning the wind-induced performance of long-span bridges under typhoon climatic conditions are proposed.