Theoretical Study on Cable Tension Detection Considering Support Vibration

This study presents a systematic approach to determine the cable tension when vibration of the cable supports is taken into account. A dynamic model by including support vibrations was developed for cable structures. Boundary conditions were modeled with equivalent stiffness and mass. The displacement function was obtained from the model and then energy method was used to obtain stiffness and mass matrices to find the relationship between the cable tension and frequency. We studied several cases for ignoring support conditions and very large or very small equivalent stiffness values. In these cases the calculated cable tension was less than the actual tension and the accurate results were obtained when vibration of the supports were included in the model. Therefore, in dynamic analysis of cable structures, vibration of the supports should be included in the model.