Condition Assessment of Timber Power Poles using Advanced NDT Techniques

Timber utility poles are widely used in power distribution and telecommunication networks to support overhead cables. These assets deteriorate with time and thus, the Australian utility pole industry annually spend lot of money on maintenance and management of timber poles. However, there are limitations and deficiencies in the current pole inspection techniques. Therefore, this research investigates the efficiency of stress wave propagation technique in detecting the damages in timber poles. Damage detection schemes, neural network models and defect severity estimation methods are developed which can be used to improve the accuracy and reliability of the pole inspection methods.