At maximum wind speed, the catenary of the cables fully inverts… but the tower barely moves.
The Unitel Tower is a guyed tower built to support the transmission antennas of the Unitel television channel. It consists of a 120-meter-tall, 30-centimeter-diameter steel tube, held by steel cables with a marked curvature in their catenary. We chose to publish it not for its size, but because its design, analysis and construction posed significant structural challenges.
A strongly curved cable exhibits highly nonlinear behavior: when the wind acts, the cable changes its shape and therefore its structural behavior. This means the equations that govern the structure change over time and must be solved with advanced iterative numerical methods.
Our work covered the design, analysis and construction of the tower. As a remarkable fact: at the maximum wind speed considered, the sag of the cable catenary fully inverts, curving upward; yet, remarkably, throughout that whole process the tower barely moves.
We design, calculate and verify structures in Bolivia and abroad, in person or remotely.
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