Telecom Towers Structure Profiler (TTSP)

In recent times, several incidents of telecom tower collapse took place in different parts of the world due to several factors such as metal fatigue, bad installation, environmental conditions and lack of maintenance. After these accidents telecom companies become more aware about the needs of early detection of the health of structures and necessity for system that have intelligent features to detect the problem instead of traditional visual inspections. So, telecom tower structure profiler (TTSP) is a project that proposes integration of latest technology in (structure health monitoring, optical sensors, M2M, and embedded processing) to build remote monitoring system for telecom steel structure assets. It is infortune that traditional visual inspections are not able to prevent such accidents. Therefore, telecom companies become more aware about the needs of early warning systems based on structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies. These systems should have intelligent features to detect the structural problems instead of traditional visual inspections.

Therefore, the TTSP is a project that proposes integration of latest technology in SHM such as optical/wireless sensors and embedded processing to build an early warning monitoring system to help preventing telecom towers collapses. The number of telecom towers installed all over the world is around four million and is expected to grow more. Visual inspection is clearly not suitable for the safety management of such many towers. So, for Telecom operators and telecom tower manufactures the system can provide comprehensive achievement in safety, decrease operation and maintenance cost, increase the lifetime of telecom towers and providing real time data and statistics from the field that could enhance also future telecom tower designs.

Objective/ Contributions

• The main objective of TTSP system is protect the valuable assets of telecommunication sites and provide characteristic profile data for telecom tower operators and manufactures to come up with rehabilitation plans or even new tower’s designs to satisfy their needs. The key point of the proposed solution is to measure the telecom tower environmental factors such as wind, humidity, acceleration, displacements, … etc. by using optical/wireless sensors. Then integrate the measured signals with a remote web application for data acquisition and profiling.
• The main two purposes of the proposed monitoring system are to:
  (i) estimate the stability of the telecom tower and (ii) establish the degree of correlation between the tower's stability and external conditions such as temperature changes, wind speed, wind direction and building structure
   

Outcome: Publications

• The project outcomes aim to provide the telecom-operators with updated and meaningful structural data and an early warning. We believe that the monitoring of the status of the towers can provide a higher-level analysis to increase the awareness about the status of the managed infrastructures.