• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.178-188
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• 2007

In this paper, a half-scaled substructure test was performed to evaluate the buckling and structural safety of an existing transmission tower subjected to wind load. A loading scheme was devised to reproduce the dead and wind loads of a prototype transmission tower, which uses a triangular jig that is mounted on the reduced model to which the similarity law of a half length was applied. As a result of the preliminary numerical analysis carried out to evaluate the stability of a specimen for the design load, it was confirmed that the calculated axial forces of tower leg members were distributed to $80{\sim}90%$ of an admissible buckling load. When the substructured transmission tower was loaded by 270% of its maximum admissible buckling load, it was failed due to the local buckling that is occurred in joints with weak constraints for out-of-plane behavior of leg members. By inspection of load-displacement curves, displacements and strains of members, it is considered that this local buckling was due to additional eccentric force by unbalanced deformation because the time that is reached to yielding stress due to the bending moment is different at each point of a same section.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.641-652
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• 2007

In this paper, a half-scaled substructure test was performed to evaluate the buckling and structural safety of an existing transmission tower subjected to wind load. A loading scheme was devised to reproduce the dead and wind loads of a prototype transmission tower, which uses a triangular jig that is mounted on the reduced model to which the similarity law of a half length was applied. As a result of the preliminary numerical analysis carried out to evaluate the stability of a specimen for the design load, is was confirmed that the calculated axial forces of tower leg members were distributed to $80{\sim}90%$ of an admissible buckling load. When the substructured transmission tower was loaded by 270% of its maximum admissible buckling load, it was failed due to the local buckling that is occurred in joints with weak constraints for out-of-plane behavior of leg members. By inspection of load-displacement curves, displacements and strains of members, it is considered that this local buckling was due to additional eccentric force by unbalanced deformation because the time that is reached to yielding stress due to the bending moment is different at each point of a same section.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.568-577
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• 2007

Friction-type reinforcing members (FRM) to enhance the resistance to wind loads of a transmission tower through both stiffness strengthening and damping increase are energy dissipation devices that utilize bending deflection of a tower leg. In this paper, the hysteretic behavior of the transmission tower structure with FRMs was experimentally investigated through cyclic loading tests on a half scale substructure model. Firstly, the variation of friction forces and durability of the FRM depending on the type of Friction-inducing materials used in the FRM were examined by performing the cyclic loading tests on the FRM. Secondly, Cyclic loading tests of a half-scale two-dimensional substructure model of a transmission tower with FRMs were conducted. Test results show that the FRM, of which desired maximum friction force is easily regulated by adjusting the amplitude of the torque applied to the bolts, have stable hysteretic behaviors and it is found that there exists the optimum torque depending on a design load by investigating the amount of energy dissipation of the FRMs according to the increase of torque.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.17 no.7 s.124
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• pp.649-661
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• 2007

Friction-type reinforcing members(FRM) to enhance the resistance to wind loads of a transmission tower through both stiffness strengthening and damping increase are energy dissipation devices that utilize bending deflection of a tower leg. In this paper, the hysteretic behavior of the transmission tower structure with FRMs was experimentally investigated through cyclic loading tests on a half scale substructure model. Firstly, the variation of friction forces and durability of the FRM depending on the type of friction-inducing materials used in the FRM were examined by performing the cyclic loading tests on the FRM. Secondly, cyclic loading tests of a half-scale two-dimensional substructure model of a transmission tower with FRMs were conducted. Test results show that the FRM, of which desired maximum friction force is easily regulated by adjusting the amplitude of the torque applied to the bolts, have stable hysteretic behaviors and it is found that there exists the optimum torque depending on a design load by investigating the amount of energy dissipation of the FRMs according to the increase of torque.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.681-695
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• 2021

Many existing transmission or communication towers designed several decades ago have undergone nonreversible performance degradation, making it hardly meet the additional requirements from upgrades in wind load design codes and extra services of electricity and communication. Therefore, a new-type non-destructive reinforcement method was proposed to reduce the on-site operation of drilling and welding for improving the quality and efficiency of reinforcement. Six built-up steel angle members were tested under compression to examine the reinforcement performance. Subsequently, the cyclic loading test was conducted on a pair of steel angle tower sub-structures to investigate the reinforcement effect, and a simplified prediction method was finally established for calculating the buckling bearing capacity of those new-type retrofitted built-up steel angles. The results indicates that: no apparent difference exists in the initial stiffness for the built-up specimens compared to the unreinforced steel angles; retrofitting the steel angles by single-bolt clamps can guarantee a relatively reasonable reinforcement effect and is suggested for the reduced additional weight and higher construction efficiency; for the substructure test, the latticed substructure retrofitted by the proposed reinforcement method significantly improves the lateral stiffness, the non-deformability and energy dissipation capacity; moreover, an apparent pinching behavior exists in the hysteretic loops, and there is no obvious yield plateau in the skeleton curves; finally, the accuracy validation result indicates that the proposed theoretical model achieves a reasonable agreement with the test results. Accordingly, this study can provide valuable references for the design and application of the non-destructive upgrading project of steel angle towers.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.57-70
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• 2012

For soft ground, a pile foundation is typically used as a substructure of transmission tower. However, differential settlement between the foundations can cause structural damage of transmission tower. The connected-pile foundation is a type of group foundation consisting of four foundations connected with beams, and it was suggested in USA and Japan. In this study, a series of 1/8 scale model pile tests were performed to investigate the effect of load direction and stiffness of connecting beam on the responses of connected-pile foundation. As a result, the load capacities of the connected-pile foundation were larger than those of the conventional group pile foundation. For example, under the given test conditions in this paper, the resistibility against differential settlement was improved significantly for connected-pile foundation and its efficiency was maximized when the stiffness of connecting beams is about 25% of the mat foundation.

• Journal of the Korean institute of surface engineering
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.423-430
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• 2016

In this study, we investigated the corrosion damage characteristics of steel for offshore wind turbine tower substructure using an accelerated electrochemical test. The galvanostatic corrosion test method was employed with a conventional 3 electrode cell in natural sea water, and the steel specimen was served as a working electrode to induce corrosion in an accelerated manner. Surface and cross-sectional image of the damaged area were obtained by optical microscope and scanning electron microscope. The weight of the specimens was measured to determine the gravimetric change before and after corrosion test. The result revealed that the steel tended to suffer uniform corrosion rather than localized corrosion due to active dissolution reaction under the constant current regime. With increasing galvanostatic current density, the damage depth and surface roughness of surface was increased, showing approximately 25 times difference in damage depth between the lowest current density ($1mA/cm^2$) and the highest current density ($200mA/cm^2$). The gravimetric observation showed that the weight loss was proportionally increased with increment of current density that has 75 times different according by experimental conditions. Consequently, uniform corrosion of the steel specimen was conveniently induced by the electrochemically accelerated corrosion technique, and it was possible to control the extent of the corrosion damage by varying the current density.