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07/02/2002
Do You Need to Learn About Wind Load?
In early March, Ricky Raudales, a sixth grader at Walker Middle School in Tampa, Florida, competed against nearly 800 students in the Hillsborough County Regional Science Fair held at the University of South Florida Sun Dome. The title of his project was “Does the Position of the Transmission Cables Affect the Wind Load on Towers?”. Ricky’s father, Ricardo Raudales, a structural engineer with Pate Engineering in Tampa, Florida, served as his advisor.
The idea for his project came when Ricky visited a tower site with his father. He noticed on the tower that there were huge black cables on one side of the tower which were so close together and so thick, it looked like a flat wall. He asked his father if this could make the tower fall over. His father responded that it would make the tower fall over easier and that it was an engineer’s job to try to figure out the best position of the cables, but that not enough research had been done yet. Thus was the birth of Ricky’s experiment. His goal was to help engineers understand better the effect of the location of transmission lines and the wind load on towers.
Ricky started by constructing a model tower using hardwood dowels. The model had the typical structure of a real communication tower. All three faces were identical having the same weight, dimensions and type of members. The tower was placed on a table and connected to a spring hook which hung down from the tower and was connected to a brick. The spring hook served as the measuring device. A leaf blower was used to simulate the wind and was situated at a constant distance from the tower. To conduct the experiments, Ricky changed the location of the “transmission lines” (he used additional wood dowels to simulate the cable) from all nine lines on the front face, then three lines to each face of the tower, and finally all nine on the back face.
Ricky was not surprised by the results of his experiments. By placing the transmission cables evenly three to a face, the wind load was the lowest. The second lowest wind load measurements came from placing all the transmission cable in the back, which was 20% higher. When he placed the transmission cables all in the front, the wind load was 65% higher than when the cables were three to a face.
Although Ricky did encounter some problems while performing his experiments, he thoroughly enjoyed the project. Aside from building the tower, his favorite part was proving his hypothesis to his dad. He received an honorable mention in the Junior Engineering category and also took home the Outstanding Use of Photography Kodak Award.
Ricky’s father found the project very interesting, not only for NATE, but also for the tower engineering world. He hopes the project will inspire other students to show an interest in the engineering field.
NATE would like to extend congratulations to Ricky for his efforts and thank him for showing an interest in and bringing positive recognition to the tower industry.
Deb Moldenhauer
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