Seismic Vulnerability of Cylindrical Steel Liquid Storage Tanks for an Oil Industry Plant

Abstract

Liquid storage tanks have a pivotal role in supplying of different type of liquids. In addition, they are widely used in disparate industrial plants. Failure of these structures has dire consequences and detrimental impacts on economy of countries. Hence, in this study, the seismic behavior of these structures with an emphasis on their seismic vulnerability under different conditions is analyzed. For this purpose, an oil industry plant in the south of Iran is considered and five different tanks with different dimension are chosen. Three significant vulnerability parameters which are usually taken into account for evaluation of tanks are investigated. These criterions include: 1) Sliding, 2) Elasto-Plastic buckling (Elephant foot buckling), 3) Tank roof damage. Four integral analyses including static, modal, response spectrum and time history is utilized. In time history analyses, multiple records are selected to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of system. Finally, the results show that tanks are safe under Elephant foot buckling fragility parameter. However, this is not always the case for tank's roof vulnerability and sliding. In addition to this, tanks with higher diameter have witnessed higher wave height and are possible to be in danger for tank's roof vulnerability, while these tanks have shown an appropriate behavior against sliding.

Dynamic Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Water Tanks under Blast Considering Fluid-Structure Interaction

“…where H P and H E are the specific pressure and the specific energy of Hugoniot per unit mass, respectively, and  is the Grüneisen coefficient. The Grüneisen coefficient is calculated using Equation (5). The specific pressure and the specific energy of Hugoniot are only a function of density.…”

“…Over the years, many researchers have studied earthquake-stimulated fluid water tanks [3,4,5,6]. The preliminary studies on water tanks have been performed by assuming a rigid wall and two linear and nonlinear behavior modes for the liquid.…”