Mr. Muralidharan was a consultant at the newly established “Jhamuna Tower Tech Pvt. Ltd. after voluntarily leaving SERC, Madras, and has been the managing director of the business since October 1996.
Jhamuna Tower Tech Pvt. Ltd. started in the year 1993 to cater to the needs of tower companies and is keeping pace with the industry from time to time. Companies in the business of supply of towers in India and Abroad without their own in-house design department are always on the lookout for consultancy organizations outside which can design and detail and support during installation. JTT fills this gap between clients who require towers and manufacturers who can supply towers. Any tower installation also requires strong and reliable civil works to be executed in any ground or on top of buildings and JTT has developed expertise to come out with optimum design of foundations. In order to that simple design packages are developed which can handle any type of soil and from geotechnical information foundation designs are done giving complete bill of quantities(BOQ) with standard operating procedures (SOP) for executing the same in the field. Also based on site visits to existing buildings to suitably locate the towers on top, stability analysis of the structure with the tower is done and drawings and BOQ are shared with the industry for executing the project. To evaluate the strength of the existing buildings data is collected regarding strength of concrete using non destructive testing (NDT) and reinforcement details are gathered using a profoscope and analysis is done using 3-D modeling using computer aided design methods.In order to execute tower erection with ease, the individual members have to be fabricated, and assembled with ease at site without any force fit. To do this it is essential that detailing of towers plays a major role. A well designed tower can fail at site if detailing is improper. At JTT from day one the emphasis was on detailing of towers and with this in view 3-D software packages are acquired with experienced staff to carry out detailing. The importance of tower detailing is felt at site with which the project could be easily completed in less time.With towers in service for a period of two decades or more, the life expectancy of them depends on how well they are being maintained or to what amount of additional loads was experienced due to severe cyclones. To assess the quality of tower “Health, Safety and Well-being (HSW) “is required to be done on them. JTT is recognized as an important organization which can assess the residual strength of towers based on field measurements and analysis and design checks carried out. Also retrofitting methods are suggested to add additional loads on existing towers.