A Study of Power Transmission Poles

An in-depth study into behaviour of high voltage transmission poles has been made covering their loading, analysis and design aspects. Due to large displacements produced, the secondary effects have to be accounted for in the solution of pole structure. Therefore, it becomes necessary to consider the geometric non-linearity while analysing a pole. The development of a new and efficient technique was considered necessary due to limitations of available methods of analysis for pole structures. For this purpose, “tapered modelling technique” has been introduced by the authors. The finite element method, considered to be providing exact solution, is based on use of thin shell elements, requires a considerably large computer time and memory. Other available modelling techniques are based on frame elements, solutions of which are not found in good agreement with the exact solution unless nodes selected are appreciably high in number. In this work, the analysis of poles is carried out by tapered model along with one of the standard packages based on finite element method. It is gratifying to note that the results obtained from developed tapered model are observed to be having close agreement with those of exact method.