Power Transmission Tower Monitoring with Hydrostatic Leveling System: Measurement Refinement and Performance Evaluation

A hydrostatic leveling system (HLS) is an automated high-accuracy measurement technology widely used for vertical displacement monitoring. This paper focuses on evaluating the performance of HLS for monitoring the deformation of a power transmission tower base together with a slope sensor and displacement meter. The monitoring results show that HLS measurements are strongly affected by the environmental temperature. Therefore, to obtain the actual deformation of a monitoring target, the measurements should be further processed to reduce the effect of temperature on the result. To this end, four data processing schemes are proposed, which are based on the frequency of processing (i.e., day by day, monthly, quarterly, or annually). The results demonstrate that the quarterly processing scheme effectively reduces the impact of temperature on deformation measurements and therefore provides the most accurate results among the four schemes considered. Since after correction, the HLS measurements are consistent with the independent monitoring results obtained from the slope sensor and displacement meter, the proposed correction strategy is workable and might be considered for similar monitoring scenarios in future.