Tapered Hollow Section Pole or Column Design 1

[JohnSiphu]

Hi,
could anyone suggest where to get a progam or buy a software that can help a structural engineer to design tapered round or multi-sided steel columns and poles using AS4100, AS/NZS4600, and the pole is designed as with base plate mounted, under windloads of AS1170.2.
your help would be very much appreciated.

 

[Ron]

FeMAP/mTAB Stress will handle tapered tube members. Some of the dedicated transmission tower software will handle these readily as they are essentially monopole towers.

Several other FEA software packages will handle these.

Where are ya Q?...... Got any others??

 

[Qshake]

Behind ya Ron!

Wow, tall order...Australian and New Zealand code design...cold formed at that isn't it.

Because of my limited international experience, I'm not sure if there is a program out there which performs code check to those specific codes but as Ron pointed out, there are several programs available for the analysis. Note that the transmission tower stuff gets pretty pricey as it is very specific.

I would suggest two places to look is the dedicated software for towers. Search the net for "tower analysis". I have a place in mind but don't have the name of it.

The other place is to look at the University of Sydney, in particular, the Centre for Advanced Structural Engineering (CASE). There is also a wind engineering center there as well. At any rate, you will be able to pick up some more information regarding specific programs and codes plus attain some helpful insight from the staff there.

Check in the past post for the name of that company which produces the tower software.

 

[ADT]

I would like to support designing this tower using first principles. Divide it into segments (you might have 5 to 10 no.) with boundaries at critical points such as attachment points etc. Assign preliminary sizes and analyse each segment for direct load and wind load effects; eg. AS1170.2 eddy/vortex shedding will be important especially in tall slender circular towers.

Then design your column segments according to the usual AS4100 slenderness, plate thickness etc provisions.

While I'm a daily user of many software packages I very frequently, eg. via spreadsheet, do my own checks or just do manual calcs. to retain a "feel" for the results to be expected.

So beware of the "all encompassing" software package. Remember "Rubbish In = Rubbish Out"?

However if you have dozens of these towers to design then that becomes another issue and I would then develop my own (probably spreadsheet-based) method to speed the process and allow delegation of design effort to others.

Anthony Tugwell
Project Director & Consulting Engineer - currently in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia

 

[JohnSiphu]

Thank you very much guys. AS means Australian Standard. That's right AS4600 is the Cold Formed Steel Design code, AS4100 is Steel Design and AS1170.2 is Wind Load Design. I am currently in Australia.
I will go thru' and try all your suggestions.

 

[kakuti]

Some of the dedicated transmission tower software will handle these readily as they are essentially monopole towers.

http://www.powline.com/

 

[meca]

There is a Self Supported Stack design program at

http://www.mecaconsulting.com

. A stack is very similar to a monopole.