Liquid storage tanks are essential facilities in lifeline and industrial systems. To ensure liquid tightness, serviceability is the prime design concern for these structures. While there have been major studies on the behavior of steel tanks, little attention has been paid to the behavior of rectangular concrete tanks. In this study, the dynamic response of concrete rectangular liquid storage tanks is investigated. In the current design practice, the response of liquid and tank structure is determined based on rigid tank wall and the lumped mass approach. However, the results of analysis show that the flexibility of tank wall increases the hydrodynamic pressures as compared to the rigid wall assumption. Also, recent studies show that the lumped added mass method leads to overly conservative results in terms of base shear and base moment. In addition, in spite of advanced analysis techniques available for dynamic analysis of liquid storage tanks such as finite element method and sequential coupling analysis procedure, there is a need to develop a simplified analysis method for practical applications.
In this thesis, a simplified method using the generalized single degree of freedom (SDOF) system is proposed for seismic analysis of concrete rectangular liquid containing structures (LCS). Only the impulsive hydrodynamic pressure is considered. In the proposed method, the consistent mass approach and the effect of flexibility of tank wall on hydrodynamic pressures are considered. Different analytical methods are used to verify the proposed model in this study. The comparison of results based on the current design practice, the analytical-finite element models and full finite element model using ANSYS® shows that the proposed method is fairly accurate which can be used in the structural design of liquid containing structures.
Parametric studies on seismic analysis of concrete rectangular LCS using the generalized SDOF system are carried out. Five prescribed vibration shape functions representing the first mode shape of fluid structure interaction system are used to study the effect of flexibility of tank wall and boundary conditions. The effect of flexibility of tank wall, the amplitude of hydrodynamic pressure, the added mass of liquid due to hydrodynamic pressure, the effective heights for liquid containing system and the effect of higher modes on dynamic response of LCS are investigated. In addition, the effect of variable size of tanks and liquid depth are studied. The contribution of higher modes to the dynamic response of LCS is included in the proposed model. A design procedure based on the structural model using the generalized SDOF system is proposed in this study. Design charts and tables for the added mass of liquid due to impulsive hydrodynamic pressure and the corresponding effective heights are presented. The proposed design procedure can be used for engineering design applications.
Generalized SDOF system for dynamic analysis of concrete rectangular liquid storage tanks
