Investigation of wall flexibility effects on seismic behavior of cylindrical silos

Abstract

This paper is concerned with effects of the wall flexibility on the seismic behavior of ground-supported cylindrical silos. It is a well-known fact that almost all analytical approximations in the literature to determine the dynamic pressure stemming from the bulk material assume silo structure as rigid. However, it is expected that the horizontal dynamic material pressures can be modified due to varying horizontal extensional stiffness of the bulk material which depends on the wall stiffness. In this study, finite element analyses were performed for six different slenderness ratios according to both rigid and flexible wall approximations. A three dimensional numerical model, taking into account bulk material-silo wall interaction, constituted by ANSYS commercial program was used. The findings obtained from the numerical analyses were discussed comparatively for rigid and flexible wall approximations in terms of the dynamic material pressure, equivalent base shear and bending moment. The numerical results clearly show that the wall flexibility may significantly affects the characteristics behavior of the reinforced concrete (RC) cylindrical silos and magnitudes of the responses under strong ground motions.