Evaluating of Mechanical Performance Uncertainty for Smart Towers

Performing safety evaluations for smart towers, a crucial component of smart city, is vital for maintaining public safety and ensuring facility stability. The single-tube tower structure is one of the main structural forms of smart tower, the dimensions of the single-tube tower, including its height, wall thickness, and cross-sectional diameter, are somewhat uncertain, influenced by processing methods, installation conditions, and human errors. To examine how uncertainty in parameters affects the single-tube tower's mechanical performance, 300 random samples of structural parameters were produced in this paper through the Latin hypercube sampling method. On this basis, this paper focuses on a 35-meter single-tube tower, crafted by China Tower Corporation for mobile communication devices, using 3D3S software to establish numerical models and statistically analyze the probability distributions for the highest element stresses and the highest displacements of the tower's top, along with a 3σ reliability approach to evaluate the structure's mechanical performance, are presented, and followed by performing analyses on parameter sensitivity. The results indicate that the uncertainty in structural parameters can lead to significant discreteness in the structure's maximum element stress and the highest displacement of the tower top, and roughly follows a normal distribution. The wall thickness's sensitivity at the bottom tower section is the largest, which plays the most important role in controlling the mechanical performance of the structure.