Research On Integral Stability Of Guyed Masts

The guyed mast consists of a slender mast and several inclined pre-stressed guys of multi-stories, which has the characters of great height, relatively small cross-section. Suffered by the non-linearity of guys and second order rnpment of the mast, the whole structure displays relatively strong non-linearity. The catastrophic failure probability of guyed masts is very high under normal designing and constructing conditions in civil engineering field. Many of them were damaged because of the integral stability failure. So it is meaningful to carry research work on the mast's integral stability.From the study before, we can see that there are several parameters involving integral stability of guyed mast. When designing a guyed mast, an engineer usually selects these parameters by their experience. For example, the initial stress of guy cables is between 200N/mm~2 and 250N/mm~2; the slope angle of guy cables is near 45°; and the slenderness ratio between stay levels is between 60 and 100. The aim of paper is to determine whether these default parameters are suitable for integral stability of guyed masts and then present the most optimized parameters.The conventional methods to analyze the stability of the guyed mast are the beam element method and the truss element matrix displacement method. The paper introduces a new method to analyze the stability of the guyed mast by using SAP2000. By comparing the integral stability of a great number of models, the paper discusses the suitable range of guyed mast's parameters, which includes the initial stress of guy cables, the slope angle of guy cables, the number of stay levels, and the slenderness ratio between stay levels.Based on the calculation in SAP2000, some influential parameters on thestability of guyed masts are analyzed and some useful conclusions are presented. Inthe finality, the problems requiring further studies are discussed.