A physical perspective of the propagation and attenuation of flexural waves is presented in this paper for the dynamic behaviors of cable stayed beams subjected to a moving load. Based on the method of reverberation-ray matrix (MRRM), the waveform solutions of the wave equations of a simplified beam-cable system subjected to a moving load (hereinafter referred to as a beam-cable system) are given, and the theory is verified by a numerical example. The dynamic response of cable stayed beams is decomposed into nine kinds of flexural waves, including traveling waves, near-field waves, and nondispersive waves, according to the wavenumber characteristics. Numerical examples are analyzed to demonstrate the propagation characteristics of flexural waves through cable stayed beams. Numerical results show that the flexural waves in the cable stayed beams are mainly low-frequency waves whose frequencies are less than 3 times the structural fundamental frequency, which can be used to further improve the computational efficiency of response analysis method based on MRRM, and the proportion of high-frequency components increases gradually with increasing structural stiffness. The near-field wave can be transformed into a traveling shear wave when its frequency is larger than the critical frequency, which decreases with increasing radius of gyration and decreasing elastic modulus of the beam. With the increase in the radius of gyration and the elastic modulus of the beam, the attenuation effect of the near-field wave weakens. The wave velocity and the wave dispersion effect have a positive correlation with the stiffness-related parameters of the beam-cable system. The study of the effect of the beam-cable system parameters on flexural wave propagation characteristics can be applied to achieve a better dynamic design for engineering structures.
