The issues of collapse of steel-truss transmission towers are addressed in the thesis. The collapse of
one or several consecutive towers causes loss of electricity supply. Consequently, a part of income
from energy supply may be lost. In addition, collapse of tower cause high direct costs of restoration of
transmission line. In the theoretical part of the thesis, the most frequent collapse patterns due to
extreme action on conductors, as well as possible solutions for protection of the towers against
collapse are presented. The practical part of the thesis, which addresses electric transmission tower
NC74 of the 2 × 110 kV transmission line, involves definition of the design action according to
standard EN 50341-1 and redesign of critical elements of the existing tower on the basis of linearelastic
analysis. Follow nonlinear static analysis for sleet-based load cases, which represented the most
critical action for design of the tower. The results of nonlinear static analysis indicated that
overstrength due to redundancy of such towers is minor. The estimated overstrength of the tower is
thus primarily consequence of the utilization rate of the structural elements in the design. In the last
part of the thesis, capacity design procedure is applied to the transmission tower in order to prevent
global collapse of structure. The diagonals and the vertical elements of the tower were protected
against failure, whereas cantilevers of the tower were selected as week parts of the structure. In order
to meet this requirement, the diagonals and vertical elements of the tower were strengthened, and the
element of the cantilever, which had the largest utilization rate, was weakened by selecting smaller
cross-section of the structural element of the cantilever. This design procedure prevents global
collapse of structure for the price of increased mass of the structure, which was in this case
approximately 14% larger than that in the case of conventional design. For the application of the
proposed design approach in practice, a probabilistic analysis of the occurrence of the extreme actions
and the cost-benefit analysis should be performed in order to prove or disprove the economic
feasibility of the proposed design approach.
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