DESIGN OF STEEL TOWERS

1. ABSTRACT
India has a large population residing all over the country and the electricity supply need of
this population creates requirement of a large transmission and distribution system. usually a
steel lattice tower, used to support an overhead power line. They are used in high voltage AC
and DC system and come in a wide variety of shape and sizes. Generally, in the design of
such towers wind governs because the height of these towers is large. The load calculation of
tower structures is little bit difficult and cumbersome.
2.INTRODUCTION
2.1 Background and Motivation
The steel tower is tall structures as shown in Fig. 1. The damages in such structures lead to
inconvenience to people. So, it should be analysed and design properly. There are different types of
steel towers but analysis and design of all the towers is similar. Fig. 2. Shows failures of steel tower
especially due to wind loading. So, it should be study in details.

Fig. 1. Typical steel towers

Fig. 2. Failure of steel towers

The design of mass-produced transmission line (TL) towers is based on minimum weight
philosophy. The towers are a lattice type, consisting of legs, primary, secondary bracings, and
cross arm members. The structural design of the tower is governed by wind loads acting on
the conductor, tower body, self-weight of the conductor, tower, and other loads caused by
icing, line deviation, broken wire condition, cascading, erection, maintenance, etc. The
members in TL towers are generally subjected to tension or compression forces caused by
external loads. Generally the tower is modeled as a pin-jointed space truss. In the analysis,
only the leg and primary bracings are considered, and the redundant members are not. TL
towers are generally analyzed by linear static analysis methods. The maximum member
forces are arrived at by assuming that all members are only subjected to axial tension and
compression forces after analyzing for significant load cases.

2.2 Objectives
The objectives of the present study have been identified as follows,
a) To analyse the tower for wind load
b) To design the tower with a solved example
2.3 Scope of the Study
a) The total load calculations for steel towers
b) The design with IS875 code
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
Although the existing design methodology for TL towers is serving the industry well, data
from full-scale tests revealed that the behavior of TL towers under complex loading
conditions could not be consistently predicted using present day analytical techniques.
Cross bracing members connected to main legs by one flange of each bracing member
significantly influences the displacement within the bracing system. As a result, the
intersection joint of tension-compression bracing system, deflects out-of-plane even at
low loads and bending moments are generated (Kemp and Behncke 1998)
Albermani and Kitipornchai (2009) presented a nonlinear analytical technique accounting
for both material and geometric nonlinearity to predict transmission tower failure. This
method was verified with the results from full-scale tower test conducted on a 275 kV
D/C transmission tower. The technique showed a good accuracy in terms of failure load
and failure mode.
Above mentioned literature shows that there is need to for a good design of towers
because there are many examples of failures of towers.

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4. TENTATIVE CHAPTER SCHEME
The tentative chapter scheme of the proposed research work will be as follows:
1) Introduction
2) Literature review
3) Types of transmission towers
4) Methods of Design
5) Solved example of steel tower
6) References

5. REFERENCES
1. Prasad Rao, N., Samuel Knight, G. M., Seetharaman, S., Lakshmanan, N., & Iyer, N.
R. (2010). Failure analysis of transmission line towers. Journal of Performance of
Constructed Facilities, 25(3), 231-240.
2. Zavelani, A., & Faggiano, P. (1985). Design of cold-formed latticed transmission
towers. Journal of Structural Engineering, 111(11), 2427-2445.