The monitoring of flexible structures such towers, antennas and pylons comprising critical infrastructure for power transmission and telecommunications is necessary in order to ensure their continuous operation. This particular field of engineering comes under the umbrella of structural health monitoring, which in recent years has been given high priority in developed countries. There, the built infrastructure is both extensive, encompassing diverse groups of systems such as energy, telecommunication, utility and transportation networks, while at the same time is ageing rapidly. The goal is to set up monitoring schemes with a stand-alone configuration and a wireless transmission of data to central locations for further processing. Thus, it becomes necessary for the sensors employed to have some structural analysis capabilities that can be used in tandem with their data processing functions, all within an artificial intelligence environment. To this end, we develop analytical models for vibrations in elastic waveguides that model flexible structures of variable cross-section and demonstrate their efficiency and accuracy through comparisons with finite element models.
