Abstract Only a few investigations have been conducted so far to study stress concentration at shell-column junctions of column-supported hyperboloid cooling towers. These have been confined to the use of axisymmetric shell finite element models. A critical look at the procedures employed and results obtained by these studies indicates that there is a need for verification by adopting other numerical procedures and also that there is scope for improvement. This paper presents stress concentration studies conducted by using a 33 degrees-of-freedom doubly curved triangular shell element and a 3D column element specifically developed for this application. A method of analysis is presented in the paper for determining forces in columns and also stress concentrations at shell-column junctions of a hyperboloid cooling tower. Case studies conducted on typical cooling towers are presented. The results obtained in this investigation are compared with those obtained earlier. The paper also discusses the relative merits of the methods of analysis used by the authors and by other researchers.
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