Effect of icing on the free vibration of guyed antenna towers

The paper summarizes the results of an extensive analytical investigation, involving six existing towers, which was conducted to identify the effect of icing on the dynamic response of the towers. They have different heights and various telecommunications equipment. A general finite element commercial package `ABAQUSʹ has been used in this study incorporating three-dimensional truss elements and beam–column elements to model the latticed mast of the tower; cable elements were used for the guy wires. These analytical results were compared with those obtained from experiments on a scaled tower model. A comparison between the natural frequencies and mode shapes obtained for the iced and for the bare towers is presented.