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Seismic Base-Acceleration Shock on Flanged Telecom Pylon with Eccentric RBE2 Mass
41-face B-Rep flanged steel pylon with 4 gusset ribs and mid-height stiffening ring discretized with curved 2nd-order TET10 elements under biaxial seismic base acceleration and eccentric RBE2 remote payload.
Telecom and power-grid pylons carrying heavy eccentric masthead equipment experience severe overturning moments and biaxial whiplash during seismic ground shock. This 41-face B-Rep model features a 220 × 220 × 25 mm anchor flange, 4 welded corner gussets, a mid-span stiffening ring at z = 500 mm, and a 160 × 160 × 30 mm top mounting flange. An eccentric equipment payload at (40, 40, 1220) mm (220 mm above the top face) is coupled to 45 top-flange slave nodes via an RBE2 spider while the foundation undergoes a biaxial seismic acceleration pulse a₀ = {35, 12, 0} m/s².
1. Geometry & FEA Mesh
- •Single-body 3D B-Rep CAD model (seismic_tower.step, 41 faces, volume 15,189.4 cm³, height 1,000 mm).
- •Curved 2nd-order tetrahedral mesh (mesh tet order=2): 942 TET10 elements, 1,863 nodes, 5,589 DOFs.
- •Structural steel (E = 200 GPa, ν = 0.30, ρ = 7,850 kg/m³) with Rayleigh damping (α = 0.5 s⁻¹, β = 2e-4 s).
2. Loads & Boundary Conditions
- •Bottom anchor flange face fully fixed (fix surface number 67).
- •Remote load spider (RBE2) on top flange face (surface number 31, 45 slave nodes) from master point (40, 40, 1220) mm with F = {−45,000, 15,000, 0} N and M = {0, −850, 320} N·m.
- •Seismic foundation acceleration pulse base_accel = {35, 12, 0} m/s² (|a₀| = 37.0 m/s²).
3. Simulation Results & Findings
- ✓Solved across 40 implicit HHT-α steps (dt = 1 ms, tend = 40 ms) with 186 total Newton-Raphson iterations (4.65 iterations/step) and 21 saved field frames.
- ✓Peak dynamic tip displacement reaches |u|_max = 13.91 mm (ux = −10.25 mm, uy = +11.66 mm) during the seismic whiplash peak.
- ✓Maximum von Mises stress reaches 3,437.1 MPa at the gusset-to-column fillet transition.
WebCAE couples quadratic TET10 solid meshes with RBE2 kinematic spiders and multi-axis base acceleration in nonlinear transient dynamics, enabling accurate seismic qualification of towers and equipment mounts.
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