Seismic response analysis of an oil storage tank using Lagrangian fluid elements

Three-dimensional Lagrangian fluid finite element is applied to seismic response analysis of an oil storage tank with a floating roof. The fluid element utilized in the present analysis is formulated based on the displacement finite element method considering only volumetric elasticity and its element stiffness matrix is derived by using one-point integration method in order to avoid volumetric locking. The method usually adds a rotational penalty stiffness to satisfy the irrotational condition for fluid motion and modifies element mass matrices through the projected mass method to suppress spurious hourglass-mode appeared in compensation for one-point integration. In the fluid element utilized in the present paper, a small hourglass stiffness is employed. The fluid and structure domains for the objective oil storage tank are modeled by eight-node solid elements and four-node shell elements, respectively, and the transient response of the floating roof structure or the free surface are evaluated by implicit direct time integration method. The results of seismic response analyses are compared with those by other method and the validation of the present analysis using three-dimensional Lagrangian fluid finite elements is shown.