LOW FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION OF CRITICAL STATES OF TRANSMISSION TOWER STRUCTURES

Transmission towers are vital parts of the overhead power line infrastructures. Any damage to these supporting structures may result in decreased load-bearing capacity and, in consequence, their collapse. Failures of transmission towers are much more severe than power failures, as they not only cause interruption to the energy supply but can also result in considerable costs of infrastructure repairs and damage. Therefore, supporting structures of overhead power lines should be subjected to structural health monitoring. This paper presents a comprehensive database containing natural frequencies and strain energies of all elements for various (simulated) damage states. On the basis of structure modal parameters, by finding the correlation between natural frequencies of damaged structure stored in the created database and natural frequencies of the structure of interest, state of the test structure can be identified. In order to verify this method, a numerical experiment was carried out. Observing the strain energy variation as compared to the undamaged state makes it possible to localize the damage and assess its importance for the further structure exploitation.