Imperfection sensitivity to elastic buckling of wind loaded open cylindrical tanks

This paper considers the buckling and post-buckling behavior of empty metal storage tanks under wind load. The structures of such tanks may be idealized as cantilever cylindrical shells, and the structural response is investigated using a computational model. The modeling employs a doubly curved finite element based on a theory by Simo and coworkers, which is capable of handling large displacements and plasticity. Buckling results for tanks with four different geometric relations are presented to consider the influence of the ratios between the radius and the height of the shell ( R/L), and between the radius and the thickness ( R/t). The studies aim to clarify the differences in the shells regarding their imperfection-sensitivity. The results show that thin-walled short tanks, with R/L =3 , display high imperfection sensitivity, while tanks with R/L = 0.5 are almost insensitive to imperfections. Changes in the total potential energy of tanks that would buckle under the same high wind pressures are also considered.

[1]  Gopalacharyulu Samavedam,et al.  Stability of Cantilever Shells under Wind Loads , 1975 .

[2]  Luis A. Godoy,et al.  Buckling of short tanks due to hurricanes , 1998 .

[3]  B. Binder,et al.  Postbuckling strength design of open thin-walled cylindrical tanks under wind load , 1998 .

[4]  J. C. Simo,et al.  On a stress resultant geometrically exact shell model. Part II: the linear theory; computational aspects , 1989 .

[5]  J. C. Simo,et al.  On a stress resultant geometrically exact shell model. Part V: Nonlinear plasticity: formulation and integration algorithms , 1992 .

[6]  Eugenio Oñate,et al.  A general methodology for deriving shear constrained Reissner‐Mindlin plate elements , 1992 .

[7]  Long-Yuan Li,et al.  Theory of Elastic Stability: Analysis and Sensitivity , 1999 .

[8]  R. Greiner,et al.  Buckling of Wind Loaded Cylindrical Shells — Application to Unstiffened and Ring-Stiffened Tanks , 1982 .

[9]  R F Rish.  FORCES IN CYLINDRICAL CHIMNEYS DUE TO WIND. , 1967 .

[10]  D. M. Purdy,et al.  Model studies of wind loads on flat-top cylinders. , 1967 .

[11]  E. Oñate,et al.  New assumed strain triangles for non linear shell analysis , 1995 .

[12]  J. C. Simo,et al.  On a stress resultant geometrically exact shell model. Part III: computational aspects of the nonlinear theory , 1990 .

[13]  Peter Wriggers,et al.  A general procedure for the direct computation of turning and bifurcation points , 1990 .

[14]  R. Greiner,et al.  Effect of imperfections on wind-loaded cylindrical shells , 1995 .

[15]  S. Yamada,et al.  Buckling and Post-buckling Characteristics of Pressure-Loaded Cylinders , 1993 .

[16]  Yasushi Uematsu,et al.  Deflection and buckling behavior of thin, circular cylindrical shells under wind loads , 1985 .