Effective technique to analyze transmission line conductors under high intensity winds

Abstract

An effective numerical technique to calculate the reactions of a multi-spanned transmission line conductor system, under arbitrary loads varying along the spans, is developed. Such variable loads are generated by High Intensity Wind (HIW) events in the form of tornadoes and downburst. First, a semi-closed form solution is derived to obtain the displacements and the reactions at the ends of each conductor span. The solution accounts for the nonlinearity of the system and the flexibility of the insulators. Second, a numerical scheme to solve the derived closed-form solution is proposed. Two conductor systems are analyzed under loads resulting from HIW events for validation of the proposed technique. Non-linear Finite Element Analyses (FEA) are also conducted for the same two systems. The responses resulting from the technique are shown to be in a very good agreement with those resulting from the FEA, which confirms the technique accuracy. Meanwhile, the semi-closed form technique shows superior efficiency in terms of the required computational time. The saving in computational time has a great advantage in predicting the response of the conductors under HIW events, since this requires a large number of analyses to cover different potential locations and sizes of those localized events.