Seismic response and collapse analysis of a transmission tower-line system considering uncertainty factors

People's cognitive limitations and the unpredictability of structures introduce uncertainties into seismic performance analyses of structures in which transmission tower-line systems are essential components that may exhibit highly uncertain behavior. Nevertheless, it is important to have a clear understanding of the procedure required to manage the uncertainties surrounding structural seismic demand estimations. A practical method used to solve uncertainty problems is sensitivity and uncertainty analysis based on randomness and probability. To propagate all pertinent sources in aleatory uncertainty (input loading) in conjunction with epistemic randomness (modeling assumption errors) to actual structural seismic response and failure quantitative analysis, an uncertainty analysis method developed especially for transmission tower-line systems under seismic excitation is constructed based on sensitivity analysis and the Latin hypercube sampling method combined with incremental dynamic analysis. Sensitivity analysis reveals the relative importance of each parameter independently, while uncertainty analysis indicates the variation in the structural seismic performance under the combined actions of different uncertainty parameters. The final results demonstrate the need to consider the effects of both ground motion and structural modeling parameter uncertainties in seismic performance analyses of transmission tower-line systems.