Hi. I’m Mary Morvak, and I’m a product marketing manager here at Neara. In this video, I’m gonna show you how Neara helps you identify and mitigate cascading pole failure risk, which is when one structure fails and pulls down neighboring poles with it, much like a domino effect. Most tools look at poles in isolation, but in the real world, when one pole fails, whether it’s due to wind, collision, or fire, it transfers load to nearby structures, increasing the chance of a broader outage. Running this type of simulation across your network reveals the extent to which failures propagate and where to intervene first. For example, if you had two poles under equal stress, how would you know which could cause more disruption to your network? I’ll show you how Neara helps you answer that. Here, we’re looking at a three d physics based digital twin of a utility network in Neara. In this model, every pole, conductor, and attachment behaves the way it would in real life, both as it would in an as surveyed context and under dynamic environmental conditions like wind or ice. Today, I’m gonna show how NERA uses finite element analysis, which breaks each structure into small components to calculate how force moves through and between them to identify exactly how and where stress affects each asset. That means it considers the relationship between assets to calculate how stress is distributed across the network from one structure to the next and even between individual components. First, I’m going to turn on the utilization report so we can see how loading changes across different NESC environment scenarios. Here, we can watch the pole behavior shift as we apply increasing wind and ice loads. In this case, we can see this particular structure reaches failure conditions under the severe scenario, as you can see by how much the pole is leaning and the red flag above it. Now let’s simulate what would happen to its neighbors when that pole fails. NERA is now calculating how forces are being redistributed across all of the connected structures, so we can determine which can withstand the increased tension and which will also fail. In this scenario, we’re seeing three additional poles fail, one on the right and two on the left side of the original pole. You can also see that the poles on either side of the cascade are now approaching critical load. This shows how failure ripples across the network, across multiple spans. If we tested a similar failure scenario on a different pole, we might see fewer downstream failures or more. Without this view of the physics based relationships between the assets in this network, it’s nearly impossible to know which failure points carry the most downstream risk. Let’s try mitigating the risk by adding a guy wire to this pole to strengthen it. As I add this guy wire, the platform dynamically recalculates the cascading failure risk. We can look around and confirm that the failure is now isolated. As we zoom out, we can see that the surrounding poles that previously failed now stay standing. This shows just how fast you can test mitigation strategies right inside the platform. As with all of the analyses in Neara, this scales across your entire network. In this demo, I’m only showing you a small area, but Neara can calculate utilization across hundreds of thousands of structures so you can prioritize capital work, harden high risk segments, and proactively reduce added risk. That’s the idea. Thanks for watching.
