Improved uplift capacity design for overhead line equipment (OLE) in granular soils

TY - JOUR

T1 - Improved uplift capacity design for overhead line equipment (OLE) in granular soils

AU - Brown, Michael John

AU - Davidson, Craig

AU - Shepherd, Charlie John

AU - Flint, Stuart Martin

AU - Mbisike, Stephen

N1 - Copyright: © 2025 Emerald Publishing Limited 2025.

PY - 2025/9/10

Y1 - 2025/9/10

N2 - With the transition to greater use of renewable energy resources and the growing demand for electricity, countries such as the UK are seeing considerable investment, expansion and upgrading of their energy transmission infrastructure. Overhead line equipment (OLE) structures in the UK typically have pad and column or pyramidal foundations with the critical loading case being tensile uplift. Design of new foundations and reassessment of existing structures often relies on simplistic and conservative design approaches where efficient design is key to minimising material use and carbon footprint. Both centrifuge testing and 3D finite element analysis were used to investigate and verify more efficient uplift design procedures. In addition, a centrifuge modelling technique was used to investigate a more realistic construction procedure and incorporated soil backfilling as an improvement over wished in place simulation. This work has shown that current frustrum based methods are conservative and may lead to unnecessary upgrading of existing structures. Other empirically based approaches generally overpredict capacity by a significant amount and may be unsafe. Investigation of recently adopted design approaches where failure mechanisms were linked to the soil’s dilation angle yielded much better performance.

AB - With the transition to greater use of renewable energy resources and the growing demand for electricity, countries such as the UK are seeing considerable investment, expansion and upgrading of their energy transmission infrastructure. Overhead line equipment (OLE) structures in the UK typically have pad and column or pyramidal foundations with the critical loading case being tensile uplift. Design of new foundations and reassessment of existing structures often relies on simplistic and conservative design approaches where efficient design is key to minimising material use and carbon footprint. Both centrifuge testing and 3D finite element analysis were used to investigate and verify more efficient uplift design procedures. In addition, a centrifuge modelling technique was used to investigate a more realistic construction procedure and incorporated soil backfilling as an improvement over wished in place simulation. This work has shown that current frustrum based methods are conservative and may lead to unnecessary upgrading of existing structures. Other empirically based approaches generally overpredict capacity by a significant amount and may be unsafe. Investigation of recently adopted design approaches where failure mechanisms were linked to the soil’s dilation angle yielded much better performance.

KW - Overjead line equipment (OLE)

KW - sand

KW - Uplift

KW - Foundations

KW - centrifuge modeling

KW - Finite element analysis (FEA)

U2 - 10.1680/jgeen.25.00006

DO - 10.1680/jgeen.25.00006

M3 - Article

SN - 1353-2618

JO - Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Geotechnical Engineering

JF - Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Geotechnical Engineering

M1 - 2500006

ER -