Design of optimal discriminant using air-induced structural vibration for groundline health assessment of wooden utility poles

Wooden utility poles are the critical components of power distribution in the United States and many parts of the world. Due to its essential societal function, comprehensive structural health monitoring technology is lacking to reflect its importance. To address this concern, the study exploits the phenomenon of air-induced oscillation due to the vortex street developed in the wake of the pole. It extracts the features of this vibration and designs an optimal classifier that can infer the health condition around the groundline region based on oscillational acceleration data. The proposed methodology consists of the following steps: (1) Construct a transient and modal orthotropic finite element model with realistic soil conditions to analyze the vibrational properties of a class 2 55-foot wooden utility pole. (2) Produce temporal vibrational responses from periodic disturbance winds of different harmonic conditions from a given transmission cable configuration. (3) Explore feature extraction techniques and design an optimal discriminant function for structural health classification. This presentation will detail the techniques and examine the preliminary efficacy of the proposed discriminant function using empirical data. Its broader impact is to examine the technical feasibility of using structural vibration to determine the groundline health condition.