Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 587317, 20 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/587317
Research Article

Seismic Response of Power Transmission Tower-Line System Subjected to Spatially Varying Ground Motions

Li Tian,1,2 Hongnan Li,2 and Guohuan Liu2

1Faculty of Infrastructure Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, No.2 Linggong Road, Ganjingzi District, Dalian, Liaoning 116024, China
2State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China

Received 10 March 2010; Revised 18 May 2010; Accepted 21 June 2010

Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani

Copyright © 2010 Li Tian et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The behavior of power transmission tower-line system subjected to spatially varying base excitations is studied in this paper. The transmission towers are modeled by beam elements while the transmission lines are modeled by cable elements that account for the nonlinear geometry of the cables. The real multistation data from SMART-1 are used to analyze the system response subjected to spatially varying ground motions. The seismic input waves for vertical and horizontal ground motions are also generated based on the Code for Design of Seismic of Electrical Installations. Both the incoherency of seismic waves and wave travel effects are accounted for. The nonlinear time history analytical method is used in the analysis. The effects of boundary conditions, ground motion spatial variations, the incident angle of the seismic wave, coherency loss, and wave travel on the system are investigated. The results show that the uniform ground motion at all supports of system does not provide the most critical case for the response calculations.