Development of seismic fragilities for a base station steel lattice cellular tower

Abstract

A large portion of the country of Turkey is located in a very high seismic region known as a first-degree earthquake zone where earthquakes occur frequently. Earthquakes result in damage to infrastructure including base station towers and subsequently failure of mobile communication networks. The loss of functionality of mobile communication networks following an earthquake has a direct impact on emergency response and both short and long-term recovery phases. Understanding both these phases requires systematic modeling of infrastructure components, which rely on fragility curves representing the probabilistic relationship between seismic intensity and damage. This study focuses on the development of damage fragility curves (fragilities) for an archetypical mobile cellular tower, namely a 55 m tall steel lattice tower (SLT) used in base station towers in Turkey. Nonlinear time history analysis was performed using a robust suite of far field ground motion records to model the performance of the archetype tower and develop damage fragilities for five specific damage states which were defined in terms of likely performance: damage state 0 (no damage), damage state 1 (uninterrupted communication), damage state 2 (communication interruption), damage state 3 (communication failure), damage state 4 (structural failure). While fragility curve has been developed for lattice towers of different types and sizes in the literature, there is no specific study for 55 m SLT and the novelty of this study is that the resulting SLT archetype fragilities can serve as a benchmark dataset for use in community-level risk and resilience analyses to improve response and recovery planning following earthquakes.