Modeling the EPRI-Wisconsin Power and Light Broken Wire Tests

In the late 1970s, the Electric Power Research Institute and Wisconsin Power and Light performed a series of tests to measure the forces on a power transmission tower due to broken conductors. Three of those tests have been modeled using ADINA, a finite-element structural analysis program with the ability to perform nonlinear time history analyses of dynamic events. When a wire breaks, the time history of the force on the tower typically has two peaks. The first peaks were modeled accurately in time and magnitude. The second peaks were modeled accurately in time; however, the magnitudes were larger than those measured during the tests. The simulated time histories contained high frequencies due to the discretization of the real structure into the finite elements. Numerical filtering was used to remove these modeling artifacts.