Determination of the condition and strength capacity of in-service timber poles in energy networks

Funding: 2011: $45,000
2012: $90,000
2013: $95,000
2014: $50,000

Project Member(s): Li, J., Crews, K.

Funding or Partner Organisation: Australian Research Council (ARC Linkage Projects)
Energy Australia
Ausgrid (Ausgrid Pty Ltd)

Start year: 2012

Summary: Timber utility poles form key infrastructure in Australian power distribution network with an estimated 1.75 billion dollars to be invested for their maintenance and replacement in the next 10 years. Lack of reliable Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) tools for evaluation of their condition and strength results in waste of valuable resources by replacing healthy serviceable poles and jeopardises safety and reliability of power distribution systems by overlooking faulty poles. This project aims to develop a novel wave-based cost-effective NDE tool for asset management of timber utility poles.

Publications:

Yu, Y, Dackermann, U, Li, J & Subhani, M 2016, 'Condition Assessment of Timber Utility Poles Based on a Hierarchical Data Fusion Model', JOURNAL OF COMPUTING IN CIVIL ENGINEERING, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 04016010-1-04016010-13.
View/Download from: Publisher's site

Yu, Y, Li, J, Yan, N, Dackermann, U & Samali, B 2016, 'Load capacity prediction of in-service timber utility poles considering wind load', Journal of Civil Structural Health Monitoring, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 385-394.
View/Download from: Publisher's site

Dackermann, U, Yu, Y, Li, J, Niederleithinger, E & Wiggenhauser, H 1970, 'A new non-destructive testing system based on narrow-band frequency excitation for the condition assessment of pole structures using frequency response functions and principle component analysis', Website Proceedings (NDTnet) of International Symposium on Non-Destructive Testing in Civil Engineering, International Symposium on Non-Destructive Testing in Civil Engineering (NDT-CE), Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und –prüfung (BAM), Berlin, Germany, pp. 666-669.

Li, J, Yu, Y, Yan, N, Dackermann, U & Samali, B 1970, 'Numerical investigation on guided wave-based damage identification and severity estimation of timber utility poles', SHMII 2015 - 7th International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure, 7th International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure (SHMII7), Torino, Italy.

Yu, Y, Dackermann, U & Li, J 1970, 'A novel damage evaluation method for timber utility poles based on wavelet packet transform and support vector machine', SHMII 2015 - 7th International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure, 7th International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure (SHMII7), Torino, Italy.

Keywords: Timber EngineeringNon-Destructive EvaluationDamage DetectionStress Wave

FOR Codes: Structural Engineering, Energy Services and Utilities, Infrastructure Engineering and Asset Management, Structural engineering

Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Bidiagal people and the Gamaygal people, upon whose ancestral lands our university stands. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.