A design approach for the ring girder in elevated steel silos

Assessment of Structural Behavior, Vulnerability, and Risk of Industrial Silos: State-of-the-Art and Recent Research Trends

“…Assuming that ground supported silos rest directly on the foundations, different support arrangements could be recognized for elevated silos (for instance, see Figure 3) depending on the silo size and on the magnitude of the force introduced into the shell body by the local support. Light silos could be discretely supported by columns, where a limited number of equidistant isolated columns are used with [37] or without [38,39] transition ring girder around the circumference. In addition, different means are developed to arrange the column-shell attachment, so that the resistance of the shell body to the local buckling and local failure is increased.…”

“…Another aspect that gains more interest among researchers is the ring girder, since it has a major role in reducing the potential buckling. The ring girder beneath the silo is responsible for redistributing reactions forces from supports into a more uniform stress state in the cylindrical shell body [37]. This aspect is dependent on the relative stiffness between columns and shell.…”

“…The shell buckling capacity suffers from significant reduction when the shell-ring stiffness ratio, ψ, exceeds the value of 0.1, and this becomes dramatic when ψ exceeds 1.0 [43]. With this regard, Zeybek and Seçer [37] provided design expressions for a ring beam of elevated steel silos and the effect of its relative stiffness (shell/ring stiffness ratio) on the ring behavior considering different supporting systems. These parameters were varied by in turn considering four columns, four columns with secondary beams, and eight columns beneath the silo, with the aim to develop design guidelines for the support conditions [37].…”