Performance Evaluation of Wire Rope Isolators for Enhancing Transportation Safety of Pre-Assembled Electricity Transmission Tower Segments

Pre-assembled electricity transmission tower segments are susceptible to vibration-induced damage during road transportation because of their large dimensions, slender structural members, and complex connections. This study proposes a wire rope isolator (WRI)-based system to reduce the dynamic response of transported tower segments under road excitation. A coupled analytical model is developed to clarify the vibration-transmission mechanism and examine the influences of key system parameters, including the mass ratio, stiffness ratio, WRI damping ratio, and vehicle suspension damping ratio. A vehicle–WRI–tower finite-element model is further established to evaluate the isolation performance under variations in road roughness, vehicle speed, and tire stiffness. The analytical and numerical results show that the WRI layer effectively attenuates the acceleration transmitted to the tower segment. Road roughness governs the absolute response and isolator deformation demand, vehicle speed produces a non-monotonic influence through spectral shifting, and tire stiffness affects the relative contribution of the isolation layer. These findings demonstrate that coordinated design of the WRI, vehicle suspension, and transportation conditions could effectively reduce the acceleration response of pre-assembled transmission tower segments. The findings are limited to the vertical response of the investigated tower segment using a prescribed linear WRI model, without device-specific capacity checks or experimental validation.