Downburst winds, which are a source of extreme wind loading and are referred to as high intensity wind (HIW) loads, have caused numerous transmission tower failures around the world. A previous investigation was conducted to study the performance of a transmission tower under downburst wind loading, where the behaviour of the tower was limited to a linear response. In the current study, a nonlinear frame element is used to assess the performance of the tower under downburst wind loading. The behaviour is studied using downburst wind field data obtained from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. In order to assess the geometric nonlinear behaviour of the tower, the results are compared to a previous linear analysis for a number of critical configurations of a downburst. The nonlinear analysis predicted that peak axial loads in certain members can be up to 34% larger than those predicted by the linear analysis.
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Ladubec et al. (2012) studied this question.
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