WIND-INDUCED DYNAMIC RESPONSE OF TRANSMISSION TOWER USING VECTOR-FORM INTRINSIC FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

The wind-induced response of a long-span lattice transmission tower was taken as an example to illustrate the usage of Vector-Form Intrinsic Finite Element (VFIFE). A program was written in C++ language to solve the mechanical problem of truss structures using the principle of VFIFE. The responses of the tower were calculated using the VFIFE program and were compared with the results obtained by traditional finite element methods. The influence of damping setting and calculating time step to the responses were investigated. Finally, the collapse analysis of the transmission tower under wind load was carried out using the VFIFE program. The results show that the displacements of the tower obtained by the two methods are very close. The total calculating time using the VFIFE program is about 1/20 of the time using the traditional finite element method, indicating that the computational efficiency of VFIFE is significantly higher than that of traditional finite element method. The results obtained by finite element methods are influenced by calculating time step and therefore trials on different time steps are suggested. VFIFE can be used to study the collapsed problem of transmission towers.