Wind-resistant reliability assessment of a super-high tower crane considering the randomness and correlation of turbulent spectral parameters

•A method to simulate wind fields is proposed considering probabilistic spectra.•The correlated spectral parameters are decoupled in the proposed method.•The proposed method can combine with the PDEM to assess structural reliability.•The reliability of a tower crane is compared between deterministic and probabilistic spectra. The need for wind-sensitive super-high tower cranes during the construction of high-rise structures has been growing, which makes it critical to assess the wind-resistant reliability of cranes. The accuracy of assessment is dominated by the refined simulation of real stochastic wind fields, which is usually based on the deterministic turbulent spectra including fixed spectral parameters. However, it might cause significant errors to estimate extreme responses of structures. Therefore, a simulation method for stochastic wind fields considering the randomness and correlation of turbulent spectral parameters is proposed in this study. The random functions of correlated spectral parameters are constructed based on several independent elementary random variables. A novel simulation method for stochastic wind fields involving the established random turbulent spectral functions is utilized to generate fluctuating wind samples at the Ma'anshan Yangtze River (MYR) Bridge site. In combination with the probability density evolution method, the stochastic response analysis and reliability assessment of wind-induced vibration of the crane are addressed. Results prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach in depicting probabilistic properties of real wind fields. Meanwhile, the wind-resistant comfort reliability of the tower crane is higher when considering the randomness and correlation of turbulent spectral parameters.