Earthquake Performance of free Standing four Legged Greenfield Towers

Abstract

Telecommunication/broadcasting towers play a vital role in telecommunication and broadcasting sectors by facilitating wireless data and signal transmissions. The failure of a tower especially under a disaster situation such as earthquake is a major concern mainly in two ways. One is the failure of communication/broadcasting facilities which will become a major setback to carry out rescue and other essential operations during a disaster while failure of a tower will itself cause a considerable economic loss as well as damages to human life since these are tall giant structures in most of the cases. Presently, a strong dialogue is going on amongst the professionals regarding the seismic condition of our country with the reported earth tremors in recent times. Hence, evaluating the structural performance of existing telecommunication/ broadcasting towers under seismic loads is utmost important since almost all existing towers have not been designed considering seismic forces due to traditional belief that Sri Lanka will not be subjected to earthquakes of appreciable magnitudes. Considering the above situation, assessment of structural performance of existing towers (which were not initially designed considering earthquake loading) under possible earthquake loading with different analytical techniques was selected as main objective of this study. Accordingly, behaviour of existing four legged Greenfield towers under seismic loading using ANSI/TIA-222-G tower design code was studied and results, observations and conclusions based on this analysis are presented.