FEM Seismic Analysis of Steel Tanks for Oil Storage in Industrial Facilities

Abstract eng:
Structural and seismic engineering are involved in the design of new industrial facilities, but have certainly a primary role in the evaluation and upgrading of existing plants. Atmospheric steel tanks for oil and other hazardous material storage are commonly used in power plants, airports, and other critical plants. Their design is somehow very standardized worldwide and thus they represent a challenging topic in the context of an industrial risk assessment related to external hazards like earthquakes. In fact, their dynamic response is not trivial, since fluid/structure interactions are relevant and influence the susceptibility to seismic damage. A full stress analysis is certainly the more accurate way to design and to evaluate the risk of steel tanks under earthquake loads, but is generally demanding in terms of computational effort. This approach leads to the direct computation of the interaction between shell deformations and content motion during earthquakes. In the present paper, seismic evaluation according to Eurocode 8 is discussed and some global results of Finite Element Analyses (FEM) analyses are compared with those obtained according to simplified design procedures by Eurocode 8.

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