Disaster investigation results have shown that most wind-induced damage to transmission towers is related to downbursts. To clarify the effects of downbursts’ parameters on transmission towers with different heights, studies were conducted on five transmission towers with different diameters under static and moving downburst wind conditions. As a comparison, the responses of the towers under normal wind conditions were studied. The results showed that the effect of downbursts on the response of the transmission tower increased with the distance between the downburst center and the tower (r) when r < 1.0 Djet (Djet is the jet diameter of downburst) and then decreased when r > 1.0 Djet. The effects of jet diameter on the response of transmission towers with different tower heights were similar. As the jet diameter increased, the response of the tower continued growing until it reached a peak value and then steadily decreased soon thereafter. When the tower height was below 81.5 m, the wind load of the downburst on the transmission tower was significantly greater than that of the normal wind. As the tower height increased, the ratio of the transmission tower’s response under the two types of wind fields rapidly declined to about 0.91–1.01.
Downburst is the main source of extreme wind speed in non-typhoon areas, which has caused a large amount of transmission line damage all over the world. In order to reveal the wind-induced vibration response characteristics of a transmission tower-line system under downburst, the nonlinear dynamic analysis of a single tower and tower-line system is carried out, and the amplification effect of tower-line coupling and fluctuating wind on the dynamic response is studied. Then, the effects of three wind field parameters closely related to the average wind profile on the wind-induced response of the tower-line system are studied. The results show that under the action of the downburst, the tower-line coupling weakens the dynamic response to a certain extent, and the dynamic amplification factor of a single tower and tower-line system is 1.1 ~ 1.3; for the self-supporting tower, when the height of the peak wind speed is close to the height of tower, the responses of the structure are more unfavorable. When the vector superposition method is used, the storm moving speed (Vt) has little effect on the wind-induced response of the tower-line system. For large-span structures such as tower-line systems, to ensure the safety of the structural design, the value of the characteristic radius (Rc) should not be too small.
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