Vibrations of a taut horizontal cable subjected to axial support excitations considering nonlinear quasi-static responses

To calculate the vibrations of a tout cable subjected to axial support excitations, a nonlinear relationship of cable force and the support displacement under static situations are employed to depict the quasi-static vibration of the cable. The dynamic components of quasi-static vibration are inputted as "direct loads" to cause the parametric vibrations on the cable. Both the governing equations of motion and deformation compatibility for parametric vibrations are then derived, which indicates the high coupling of cable parametric force and deformation. Numerical solutions, based on the finite difference method, are put forward for the parametric vibrations, which is validated by the finite element method under periodic axial support excitations. For the quasi-static response, the shorter cables are more sensitive to support excitations than longer ones at small cable force. The quasi-static cable force makes the greatest contribution to the total cable force, but the parametric cable force is responsible for the occurrence of cable loosening at large excitation amplitudes. Moreover, this study also revealed that the traditional approach, assuming a linear relationship between quasi-static cable force and axial support displacement, would result in some great error of the cable parametric responses.