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Chapter II
Functional
Overview
iTOWERS Designer is a fully automated, turnkey, integrated Engineering Design Software Tool for
skeletal steel structures like Transmission Line Towers is intended to support :
- Designers and Consultants
- Corporations, Nodal Agencies and Regulatory Boards
- Manufacturers, Fabricators and Erectors
Ever since the installation of the first tower line, transmission tower design engineers have been striving
hard for optimization to achieve economic designs. This aspect of optimization finds its significance in
the fact that the cost of the towers constitutes about 45% of the total cost of the transmission lines.
iTOWERS Designer facilitates drawing-up an optimum design, balancing the design whilst ensuring
economy.
With rapid industrialization and urban growth, structural engineers often have to design bigger and more
complex structures. They seek procedures, which will enable them to produce cost-effective, and
quality design. Several software packages are available today to perform a single or a few tasks in the
various stages of the design cycle. However, these packages are generic in nature and do not address
the unique nuances pertaining to transmission line tower design in a focussed manner.
iTOWERS Designer is customized for application in tower design specifically. It incorporates state-of-
the-art techniques for total design of Transmission Line Tower Structures. Further, the modular
organization of iTOWERS Designer extends from concept to commissioning and encompasses the
following:
Data base
Tower specifications
Section properties as per various codes of practices
Conductor/Ground Wire properties as per various codes of practices
Design specification as per various codes of practices
Sag Tension Calculations
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3-D Geometry Generation of Tower
Automatic Generation of Loading Intensity and Position
Structural Modeling and Analysis
Design, in line with International Practices
Bill of Materials
Graphics Support
Reports Generation
iTOWERS Designer adopts an integrated approach, which includes all design activities for a cost-
effective solution and higher productivity. The modular organization of iTOWERS Designer ensures
compact data input, ease in change of tower configuration, realistic modeling and analysis, iterative
optimization and full adaptability to various codes of practice.
Fundamental to the development of iTOWERS Designer is the utilization of the constructs of
‘parametric software design’. This ensures overall integrity while examining and changing details.
Concurrent adherence to requirements, constraints, design procedures, production feasibility, codes and
practices, etc., is thereby built-in. Re-entry at various levels of the design cycle transforms iTOWERS
Designer into a powerful tool for iterative process, an invaluable aid for tender/bid negotiations and a
wholesome manager of complex and efficient design tasks.
iTOWERS Designer makes continuous references to flexible databases of patterns, sections, etc. for
knowledge accrual, making it live and growing. Unlike the conventional software approach of using
computers as drafting machines, iTOWERS Designer provides for extraction of drawings as a logical
consequence of the design process.
By virtue of the above, iTOWERS Designer can render the vital cutting edge in competitive and
mission critical situations involving:
Tender/Bid negotiations
Standardization of towers, for repetitive use
Time-bound design requirements
Cost-effective, total, final design solutions
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iTOWERS Designer is a user-friendly system. Additionally the 500+ extensively used patterns are
included and proprietary design/analysis tools are written in C, VC++ and FORTRAN with minimal
operating system dependencies. Hence, iTOWERS Designer is OPEN end executable on any computer
platform.
iTOWERS Designer is the result of more than a hundred man-years of software development effort by
technically strong structural engineers. iTOWERS Designer has also been extensively validated by
“industry experts” to suit a live and practical design environment.
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