Recommended guidelines for upgrading existing towers

There is a need to match guyed telecommunication tower strength requirements to the significance of the structure and the economic consequences of its failure. Uniformly high strength requirements will occasionally result in reinforcement costs that exceed the costs of the risk of failure. In answer to this, a rational approach has been used to develop a set of guidelines for the upgrading of existing towers. This methodology relies on the classification of towers in various reliability classes, having increased probabilities of failure attached, and correspondingly lower load factors for use in the analysis. Results from this research are presented, together with the recommended proposed guidelines.