Engineers from Novosibirsk State Technical University "NETI" have developed a program for classifying power line towers into groups based on their degree of wear. This program automatically ranks the structures into categories for more efficient planning of maintenance and repair costs.
Typically, the condition of power line towers is diagnosed by specialists who record about 20 parameters every six years: the degree of deformation of the angles, damage to insulators, loosening of the tower's attachment to the foundation, inclination of the structure, etc. At NSTU "NETI", it was proposed to determine the degree of tower wear using a special program based on experimentally determined natural frequencies of the structure.
The diagnosis of towers is based on a control parameter such as the natural frequency of oscillations, which is determined using a special sensor "LEPTON-1", developed at NSTU "NETI" several years ago.
The sensors installed on the tower structure collect large amounts of data, so we needed software that automatically processes the information and ranks the towers according to their degree of wear — from serviceable to limitedly serviceable.
NSTU "NETI"'s software has already received a certificate of registration for a computer program (No. 2025688297 dated 10/17/2025) and is used in the educational process to familiarize students with modern approaches to diagnosing the condition of energy structures.
The program was written jointly with Pavel Lastochkin, a postgraduate student of the Department of Aircraft Strength, during the preparation of his Ph.D. thesis. NSTU "NETI" considers the development to be unique.
There are no analogues to our frequency-based program in the domestic energy sector. In addition, our software allows for a significant saving of funds on diagnostics and the working time of specialists.
