Dynamic analysis of suspended cables carrying moving oscillators

An efficient procedure for analyzing in-plane vibrations of flat-sag suspended cables carrying an array of moving oscillators with arbitrarily varying velocities is presented. The cable is modelled as a mono-dimensional elastic continuum, fully accounting for geometrical nonlinearities. By eliminating the horizontal displacement component through a standard condensation procedure, the nonlinear integro-differential equation governing vertical cable vibrations is derived. Due to the dynamic interaction at the contact points with the moving oscillators, such equation is coupled to the set of ordinary differential equations ruling the response of the travelling sub-systems. An improved series representation of vertical cable displacement is proposed, which allows to overcome the inability of the traditional Galerkin method to reproduce the kinks and abrupt changes of cable configuration at the interface with the moving sub-systems. Following the philosophy of the well-known “mode-acceleration” method, the convergence of the series expansion of cable response in terms of appropriate basis functions is improved through the introduction of the so-called “quasi-static” solution. Numerical results demonstrate that, despite the basis functions are continuous, the improved series enables to capture with very few terms the abrupt changes of cable profile at the contact points between the cable and the moving oscillators.