An Innovative Structural Health Monitoring System for Large Transmission Towers Based on GPS

In this paper, we propose an innovative structural health monitoring (SHM) system for large transmission towers that are frequently subjected to strong winds. The system is based on the strategy of using a static force equilibrium equation to calculate the whole structure’s real-time stress distribution according to its real-time behavior, as captured by the global positioning system (GPS). The reason for adopting this approach is that large transmission towers are fundamentally quasi-static structures and they are not prone to resonance under wind excitations. A case study is used to present the SHM system, then its effectiveness is validated by comparing the simulated SHM results with the exact solution obtained by a realistic time-history dynamic analysis. Additionally, we discuss the use of a new reliability analysis method based on the Ditlevsen’s bounds to assess the real-time structural conditions.