BCI Wireless, an affiliate to
Structural Components, has taken on a joint venture with other reputable companies
to create safety within the tower industry, increase accuracy in analysis
and to save money for tower owners.
After seeing the subjectivity in interpretation of the effects of wind flow
around structural reinforcements and linear appurtenances on the outside
of monopoles,
BCI and other leading companies have collaborated to fund
full scale wind tunnel testing to obtain ‘hard data’ of wind coefficients to
increase accuracy on monopole analysis.
The test subjects were 12 & 18 sided monopoles with and without
structural reinforcements, transmission lines and various types of
platforms and antenna configurations.
By performing tests of this magnitude, the real life drag coefficients will
help take the guess work out of analyses by providing true values for such
subjective issues as laminar flow around poles with linear appurtenances
and shielding of multiple antennas on triangulated platforms. The results
will be published in an effort to gain consistency in the tower industry.
Structural Components' patent pending
WAVESystem was also subject to full scale
testing on a pole in an effort to maximize the efficiency of the system. As
the preferred upgrade choice by many tower owners, testing of the
WAVESystem is a process that will be beneficial to the tower owner and
BCI as
well as the entire wireless industry.
Testing Facilities
Full Scale wind tunnel testing was recently performed at the
Langley Full Scale
Tunnel at Langley, VA. The tunnel is the largest University-Operated Wind
Tunnel in the world.
The tunnel test section is normally 30ft. high by 60ft. wide with a quasi-
elliptical cross section, 56ft. long. It is a closed circuit, three quarter open-
jet, double return, continuous flow design which operates at atmospheric
pressure.
The test facility is equipped with a PSI-8400 electronically scanned
pressure transducer system. It consists of a data acquisition and
calibration unit, and remote pressure- measuring modules.
