PLS-POLE

Analysis and Design of Structures with Wood, Laminated Wood, Steel, Concrete and FRP Poles or Modular Aluminum Masts

PLS-POLE is a powerful and easy to use Microsoft Windows program for the analysis and design of structures made up of wood, laminated wood, steel, concrete and Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) poles or modular aluminum masts. The program performs design checks of structures under user specified loads and can also calculate maximum allowable wind and weight spans. Virtually any transmission, substation or communications structure can be modeled, including poles, H-frames, A-Frames, and X-Frames. These models are rapidly built from components such as poles, arms, guys, braces, and insulators.

PLS-POLE is the result of nearly 25 years of evolution from our earliest structural analysis programs. It is the direct successor of our popular CPOLE, CFRAME, SPOLE, SFRAME, WPOLE, WFRAME and G-MAST programs. During our years supporting these programs we have continually refined our algorithms, user interface and program design. The result is PLS-POLE, a powerful and comprehensive design tool with unsurpassed reliability and ease of use.

Comprehensive Structure Modeling

PLS-POLE structures are collections of the following elements:

• Concrete poles

• Steel poles

• Wood poles

• Laminated wood poles

• Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP)

• Modular latticed masts

• Davit arms

• Cross arms

• Guys

• Cables

• Braces

• Equipment (user defined items like transformers, ladders...)

• Insulators (clamp, strain, post, suspension, 2-parts)

Building a structure is as simple as selecting the desired element from a library of available elements and telling the program where it attaches to other elements. You are free to mix and match the various elements at will. This gives you the power to create arbitrarily complex structures and even allows you to mix wood, steel and concrete elements in the same structure.

The element libraries define the sizes, weights and strengths of your standard structural components. You can create these libraries yourself or use libraries provided by your suppliers. Using libraries of standard reusable components greatly enhances your productivity by significantly reducing the amount of input, which also reduces the chance of error.

Simple and Powerful Finite Element Analysis

PLS-POLE takes the pain out of finite element analysis. An H-Frame in PLS-POLE is input as a collection of macro elements like poles, cross-arms and braces. These elements are selected from a library where you enter the properties of macro elements like a pole's top and base diameter, wall thickness and shape (round, 16 sided…). PLS-POLE automatically breaks your macro elements down into many cable, truss and beam elements. In just a few minutes with PLS-POLE you can build structures that would take days to model in a traditional finite element program.

2-Part insulator going into compression A special version of our SAPS finite element analysis engine powers PLS-POLE. We designed SAPS specifically for solving complicated transmission line and guyed communication structure problems that other finite element programs couldn't. For nearly 30 years of production use SAPS has proven to have one of the best nonlinear cable elements available anywhere.

PLS-POLE is capable of performing both linear and nonlinear analyses. Nonlinear analysis allows you to see P-Delta effects, to detect instabilities, and to perform accurate buckling checks. PLS-POLE models guys, cables and 2-part insulators as 3-d cable elements. This sophisticated analysis works even when elements have large displacements as is the case with the 2-part insulator pictured to the right.

ASCE and Other Code Checks

Once PLS-POLE has calculated the forces and moments experienced in the different pieces of your structure it compares them against code capacities. The results of these checks can be displayed in text reports, spreadsheets or color-coded graphics.

Either ASCE/SEI 48-11 (previously ASCE manual 72) or other international standards can be used to check steel poles and tubular steel elements. Wood poles are checked against their ultimate stress and the fiber stress can be reduced with height according to ANSI O5.1 (2002, 2008, 2015, 2017). PLS-POLE detects wood pole buckling by your choice of exact nonlinear analysis, the Gere and Carter method, the REA method or a user programmable method. Concrete poles are checked against a moment capacity diagram. The PLS-POLE manual describes how these checks are implemented and lists the assumptions made.

Text summary of allowable spans for different heights and classes of wood poles In addition to these code checks PLS-POLE can calculate pairs of allowable wind and weight spans for a specified value of their ratio, or better yet, determine entire interaction diagrams between the allowable wind and weight spans. Optimum spotting performed with these interaction diagrams will result in a more economical solution than traditional spotting where a single wind and weight span pair is used.