A TIME-EFFICIENT APPROACH FOR THE COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATION OF CROSS-ROPE TRANSMISSION LINES DYNAMICS UNDER SYNOPTIC WIND LOAD FIELDS

BRUNO RANGO; MARTA B. ROSALES

Resistencia, Argentina

Congreso; MECOM2021: XXXVII Congreso Argentino de Mecánica Computacional; 2021

In high and extra-high voltage Overhead Transmission Lines (OTLs), guyed towers areusually preferred over self-supported configurations for economic reasons that derive from their lowerweight, which, at the same time, results in a higher slenderness. The structural complexity of theseconfigurations, in addition to the stochastic nature of the main external actions (i.e. wind and ice), hasresulted in several academic studies related to the dynamic nonlinear behavior of OTLs. Indeed, theproblem has been tackled through analytical, experimental, and computational approaches. Numericalmethods, in particular, offer the possibility of implementing parametric sensitivity analyses, which arerelevant in this kind of nonlinear dynamic systems. Likewise, through the computational approach, itis possible to derive a robust representation of the structural response by means of the implementationof uncertainty quantification (UQ) studies. However, both types of studies usually require the repeatedsimulation of the dynamic problem under varying conditions. In such schemes, the dimension of thediscretized system can become a limitation. Therefore, it is important to restrict the system number ofdegrees of freedom, while maintaining a reasonable accuracy in the discretized mathematical model. Inthis work, a strategy is proposed for the numerical simulation of the dynamic response of an OTL withCross-Rope supporting structures. The real-life succession of conductor spans and supporting towers isreduced to a single central supporting structure and two adjacent spans. The span continuity of the realsystem is approximated in this model through the implementation of periodic boundary conditions andlinear elastic supports. For the characterization of the boundaries stiffnesses, an optimization schemebased on the Genetic Algorithm is implemented. The resulting system makes it possible to simulate thedynamic response under stochastic synoptic boundary-layer wind load fields within reasonable time inthe context of Monte Carlo simulations and parametric sensitivity analyses.