Numerical and Experimental Study of Wind Effect on the Storage Tanks Based the Tank Adjacency

Storage tanks are placed in group arrangements in refinery plants. Furthermore, winds may be treated as a critical lateral load for such structures. The present study explores the effects of storage tank adjacency on wind pressure variations. The wind tunnel test was employed to obtain the wind pressure coefficients on corrugated-plate tanks with rise-to-span ratios of 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5. These coefficients were also calculated numerically through a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach and compared to the experimental data. To evaluate the adjacency effect, two adjacent tanks in the transverse and longitudinal directions and the base tank with longitudinal and transverse adjacency were studied. The wind pressure coefficients were compared to the non-adjacency scenario. It was found that the adjacency effect was below 10% in transverse and longitudinal adjacency scenarios at distances three and four times as large as the diameter, respectively. The corrugated-plate tanks were found to have smaller negative (suction) pressure coefficients than simple-plate ones.