WIND LOADING OF SHIPYARD GANTRY CRANES - A COMPARISON OF FULL-SCALE MEASUREMENT, WIND TUNNEL TEST AND GUST FACTOR APPROACH

Shipyard gantry cranes are nowadays built up to about 100 m hook height and 200 m span. Wind loading is becoming a major factor in design. Therefore, detailed and modern approaches to wind loading are required. They have to be verified by full-scale measurement. In this paper some results of full-scale measurement are reported and compared to results of a boundary layer wind tunnel test and a gust factor approach. For the general dynamic behavior of the crane a good correspondence can be observed. The gust factors for open terrain are typically in the order of 2. The size of the structure results in a low level of wind correlation and an essential amount of aerodynamic damping which effectively counterbalances the effects of the low first natural frequency of about 0.1 Hz.