With the rapid advancement of computer technologies enabling fast calculations of complex structures, numerical methods have become a central tool in engineering sciences, while physical models have increasingly receded into the background. Nevertheless, owing to their clarity and comprehensibility, these former engineering tools remain of great value and their use can still be highly relevant today. At the example of the scale model of the Lillebælt Bridge -- developed by the Copenhagen engineers Christen Ostenfeld and Wriborg Jønson and given for research purposes to the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar -- this paper illustrates how physical models can still serve as useful instruments in research and teaching. By applying operational modal analysis, the natural frequencies and damping ratios of the bridge model are experimentally determined, which in turn can serve as reference data for the calibration and validation of numerical models.

翻译：随着计算机技术的飞速发展使得复杂结构的快速计算成为可能，数值方法已成为工程科学的核心工具，而物理模型则逐渐退居其次。尽管如此，由于这些传统工程工具具有清晰性和可理解性，它们仍具有重要价值，且其应用在今天依然高度相关。本文以Lillebælt大桥缩尺模型为例——该模型由哥本哈根工程师Christen Ostenfeld与Wriborg Jønson开发，并出于研究目的赠予包豪斯-魏玛大学——阐述了物理模型如何在研究与教学中继续发挥有效工具的作用。通过应用运行模态分析，实验确定了该桥梁模型的自振频率与阻尼比，这些数据进而可作为校准与验证数值模型的参考依据。