Movable guyed masts affected by wind loads: Buckling and stochastic response

Abstract

This paper presents a new structural system to be used in communication towers and demonstrates the achieved improved structural performances with respect to currently used cable-stayed masts. The proposed structure is a cable-stayed tower where a truss system is introduced as a new link between the cables and the mast in order to improve the lateral stiffness and to reduce instability phenomena. The motivations and the main design choices for such a supporting structure are outlined. Numerical models are developed in order to accurately describe the geometrically nonlinear behavior of both the cables and the whole system. A combined linear/nonlinear stability analysis is proposed to investigate the structural stability of the system and the Monte Carlo simulation approach is used to estimate the stochastic response of the supporting structure to a correlated Gaussian vector describing the wind load. The obtained results manifest the better performances achievable by introducing the truss system. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.