Stochastic finite element method study on temperature sensitivity and reliability of the steel telecommunications towers

Abstract This paper addresses an important question in structural analysis how to efficiently model the uncertain temperature influence on the internal forces in particular structural elements of the steel telecommunication towers. The computational methodology proposed here is based on the traditional Finite Element Method enriched with the generalized stochastic perturbation technique and the computational implementation is performed using the FEM commercial system ROBOT jointly with the symbolic algebra computer system MAPLE. Contrary to the previous straightforward differentiation techniques, now the local response function method is employed to compute any order probabilistic moments of the structural state functions. The response function is assumed in the polynomial form, whose coefficients are computed from the several solutions of the deterministic problem around the mean value of the random temperature. This method is illustrated on the example of telecommunications tower with a height 52 meters modelled as the 3D truss structure under Gaussian random temperature load, which leads to the determination of its reliability indices