Professor Haecheon Choi's team and Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information succeeded in reproducing the world's first 'Tacoma Bridge collapse accident'

The entire process is reproduced a supercomputer

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) announced the 26th that it has succeeded in reproducing the entire process of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse accident that occurred in 1940 with a supercomputer for the first time in the world in collaboration with Professor Haecheon Choi's research team at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University.

The Tacoma Bridge collapse accident was introduced in many fluid mechanics textbooks as a large-scale accident caused by the aeroelastic characteristics of the bridge, but the collapse process has not been clearly identified so far.

This simulation, conducted by the KISTI-Seoul National University joint research team, uses a supercomputer to create the most similar conditions to the real thing at the time of the accident, and analyzes the vibration and collapse mechanism of the bridge caused by the wind to reproduce the entire process of the Tacoma Bridge collapse accident using a supercomputer, Nurion, used up to 160,000 CPU cores for three months.

The bridge is known to have collapsed while moving in the vertical and torsional vibrations under the influence of wind from a stationary state. Through supercomputing, the research team confirmed that torsion occurred due to the aerodynamic force applied by the wind to the bridge, and that the aerodynamic force and torsion amplified each other over time.

The flow in this simulation belongs to the turbulence. Turbulence refers to the disorderly and irregular flow of air or water, which usually occurs when the velocity is high. More than 13 billion grids are needed to simulate the entire Tacoma Bridge area as turbulent flow. A simulation that reproduces this is impossible without an ultra-high-performance computer, that is, a supercomputer.

In this study, Seoul National University jointly developed software with KISTI and simulated the collapse of the Tacoma Bridge through KISTI's supercomputer Unit 5.

Haecheon Choi, a professor at Seoul National University, said, “With the development of supercomputers, we can understand important flow phenomena that were not understood in the past.”

“With supercomputing simulation, we reproduced the collapse of the Tacoma Bridge, a historic accident. We expect that with the introduction of Unit 6, which is 23 times higher than Unit 5, to be able to solve previously unsolved challenges with super-large simulations.” said Jeong Min-joong, director of the KISTI Supercomputing Application Center.

The results of this research were published September 23^rd in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, an academic journal with the highest authority in the field of fluid mechanics.


Source : 서울경제 (https://www.sedaily.com/NewsView/26CI1PBIPQ/GK0207)