Thin-Walled Cylindrical Shell Storage Tank under Blast Impacts: Finite Element Analysis

Abstract

Thin-walled cylindrical shell storage tanks are pressure vessels in which the walls of the vessel have a thickness that is much smaller than the overall size of the vessel. These types of structures have global applications in various industries, including oil refineries and petrochemical plants. However, these storage tanks are vulnerable to fire and explosions. Therefore, a parametric study using numerical simulation was carried out, considering the internal liquid level, wall thickness, material yield strength, constraint conditions, and blast intensity, with a diameter of 100 m and height of 22.5 m under different blast loads using the finite element analysis method. The thickness of the tank wall is varied as 10 mm, 20 mm, 30 mm, and 40 mm, while the fill level of internal fluid is varied as 25, 50, 75, and 100%. The blast simulation was conducted using LS-DYNA software. The numerical results are then compared with analytical results. The effects of blast intensity, standoff distance, wall thickness, and fill level of internal fluid on the structural behaviour of the storage tank were investigated and discussed.

Cylindrical Steel Tanks Subjected to Long-Duration and High-Pressure Triangular Blast Load: Current Practice and a Numerical Case Study

“…This article gives an overview of accident frequencies of atmospheric storage tanks and past accidents described in the open literature to show the possible accidental sequences, underline the most frequent causes involved in explosions of atmospheric storage tank, and highlight the potential consequences of such accidents [22]. In general, within the wide range of accidental explosion types, vapor cloud explosions are a major concern in the petrochemical and petroleum industry [20,[23][24][25][26]. The same applies to LNG process units [27][28][29] and can therefore be adopted to ammonia process units as the main cause for the blast overpressure analysis and design.…”

“…However, because tanks have long been designed based on simplified rules and many years of experience, and because finite-element analysis has only been the state of the art for more complex tank analysis problems in the last two decades, blast load analyses of tank structures are still challenging and part of the current research. A large proportion of the analyzed literature uses the simplified dynamic method based on the shockwave propagation described in Section 2.2, which can be applied in LS-DYNA [18] by means of the already mentioned feature *LOAD_BLAST_ENHANCED, for instance [24,26,41]. In contrast, there are several works that adopt a different approach.…”

Experimental and Theoretical Reproducibility Research on the Earthquake Resistance of Cylindrical Steel Tanks

“…At the present stage of the ongoing research in the field of the earthquake resistance of plate and shell structures, a number of relevant studies can be found [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61]. Particularly, in the work proposed by Śliwa et al [47], in order to restore the carrying power of a structure, the problem of repairing the "dents" with carbon fibers was considered, but the issue of the dynamic effects was not investigated.…”

“…Moreover, the study proposed by Joniak et al [49] considered the issue of elastic bending, where an analytical formula for critical stresses for open round cylindrical thin shells in a state of pure bending was proposed. Conversely, the work presented by Al-Yacouby et al [50] focused on numerical modeling for the design of operational loads taking into account hydrodynamic pressure. In Hud [51] and Sierikova et al [52], a Finite Element (FE) model of a full-scale steel tank was implemented and calculations were executed under operational loading.…”