Prediction of the aerodynamic instability of ice-accreted bridge cables using different stability criteria

The aerodynamic force coefficients of iced bridge cables were recently obtained by the authors through a series of static wind tunnel tests on a full-scale vertical and inclined bridge cable section model, under typical climatic conditions of incloud icing. The availability of these data allows the application of quasi-steady stability criteria. During the last decades, a number of stability models were derived to investigate the galloping phenomenon, with different levels of detail. In this paper, an attempt is made to compare background hypotheses and results obtained using different quasi-steady sectional aerodynamic stability criteria, applied to ice-accreted bridge cables. Not existing a benchmark, the research is not aimed at judging the quality of each approach, but rather at pointing out the differences they bring.