Seismic Damage Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Grain Silos

This paper deals with seismic performance and damage assessment of concrete grain silos. An existing large silo is taken as a case study to conduct the numerical analyses. A global damage index based on target displacement is proposed to quantify numerically different damage states of the structure. To this aim, the classical N2 method is extended to adaptive multimodal to evaluate seismic performance of the structure for increasing pic ground acceleration levels with taking into account degradation of stiffness and modification of modal characteristics. The seismic capacity of the silo is evaluated, as an averaged curve, by conducting pushover and several incremental dynamic analyses using artificial and recorded accelerograms. The seismic demand is derived from the design spectrum of the Algerian seismic code (RPA 2003). The target displacement is determined by taking into account both the participation of the dominant modes, and the degradation of the structure's modal characteristics. The nonlinear behavior of the structure's walls is modeled by using nonlinear multilayered shell elements. The effect of the stored granular material is included through distributed equivalent masses. It is found that when the structure modal characteristics are updated as its stiffness is degraded, the target displacement is correctly computed. Whereas, it wrongly grows indefinitely, with increasing PGA, when constant modal characteristics of the intact structure are assumed, as usually done. The proposed global damage index is compared to three existing reliable indices. It better reflects the different damage states of studied silo.