Large-scale aeroelastic testing to investigate the resiliency of transmission infrastructure to hurricane storms
Conference
Azzi, Z, Elawady, A, Chowdhury, AG. (2020). Large-scale aeroelastic testing to investigate the resiliency of transmission infrastructure to hurricane storms
. 1 1944-1957.
Azzi, Z, Elawady, A, Chowdhury, AG. (2020). Large-scale aeroelastic testing to investigate the resiliency of transmission infrastructure to hurricane storms
. 1 1944-1957.
An aeroelastic experimental study is ongoing at the NSF designated Experimental Facility Wall of Wind (WOW) aiming at advancing the knowledge pertaining to the dynamic behavior of power transmission infrastructure during strong windstorms including hurricanes. The WOW is a large open jet wind testing facility capable of simulating hurricane winds at different wind speeds and up to 70 m/s (Category 5 hurricane). The study is motivated by the increasing storms including hurricanes which recently are reported to cause substantial losses to the U.S. energy infrastructure. A multi-spanned aeroelastic transmission line system is designed and constructed at the WOW using a length scale of 1:50 for the tower and a distorted length scale of 1:150 for the conductors. The selected length scales enable considering several test configurations including various wind directions ranging between 0° to 90°. While adopting the Froude number scaling, the tests are conducted at speeds ranging between 5 m/s to 10 m/s, representing full-scale wind speeds ranging between 35 m/s to 70 m/s. The aeroelastic test results are analyzed in order to assess the dynamic response of the transmission towers during the simulated hurricane conditions. This includes an investigation of the modal properties, the development of a new technique to estimate structural and aerodynamic damping, and comparison of the resulting drag coefficients with values specified in ASCE 7-16.
