Dynamic buckling and seismic fragility of anchored steel tanks by the added mass method

Buckling plays a fundamental role in the design of steel tanks because of the small thicknesses of the walls of this class of structures. The first part of the paper presents a review of this phenomenon for liquid-containing circular cylindrical steel tanks that are fully anchored at the base, considering the different buckling modes and especially the secondary buckling occurring in the top part of the tank. A case study based on a cylindrical tank is then introduced in order to investigate various aspects of dynamic buckling. The finite element model of the case study tank is set-up using the added mass method for fluid modelling. The influence of pre-stress states caused by hydrostatic pressure and self-weight on the natural periods of the structure is first studied and it is found that this influence is very small as far as the global behaviour of the tanks is considered, while it is important for local, shell-type, vibration modes. In the following, the efficiency and sufficiency of different ground motion intensity measures is analysed by means of cloud analysis with a set of 40 recorded accelerograms. In particular, the peak ground displacement has been found being the most efficient and sufficient intensity measure so far as the maximum relative displacement of the tank walls is concerned. Finally, incremental nonlinear time-history analyses are performed considering the case study structure under recorded earthquake ground motions in order to identify the critical buckling loads and to derive fragility curves for the buckling limit state. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.