Finite Element Analysis Of The Large Alumina Steel Silo Subject To Static And Dynamic Loading

The steel silo is widely used to store dispersed materials in many aspects of industry, such as mining, metallurgy, chemical, electric power, agriculture and the alike. Unlike traditional reinforced concrete silo,the steel silo has many merits such as lightly deadweight, short cycle of construction, investment effectively, craft readily to be modified. Therefore, in recent years, steel silos are used to store the sandy alumina (dry powder) in aluminum smelting industry, the development of which has led to yearly increment of the total production of alumina and the requirement of large-scale, gargantuan steel silo.Recently, the norms and standards between different countries about the design of large-scale steel silo are not identical----especially stored material loads acting on steel silos and seismic analysis of the whole-silos. Nevertheless, engineering incidents as crack, breakdown still take place in the applying of them.This article takes a large-scale alumina steel silo as its research object,and has established a three dimensional silo model using the general finite element software ANSYS. Detailed calculation and analysis of this structure subject to static and dynamic loading is implemented with finite element simulation.(1) A static analysis considering the most unfavorable situation is studied, calculating the stored material loads, wind loads and snow loads according to the standard, and find that stored material loads is the most effective to other loads when alumina filled up the silo.(2) Assume the alumina powder as a continuous medium, establish a contact silo model. By comparing with result of the former model the result of model considering the alumina powder as equivalent load, the equivalent mechanical parameters of alumina powder are concluded.(3) Dynamic analysis is carried out to obtain the fundamental frequency and vibration modes of this structure, and also obtain the dynamic response under seismic effect through the response spectrum analysis.(4) The time-history analysis is used to calculate the dynamic response of the structure under the three typical seismic waves. The result shows that when considering the seismic as eight-intensity-resistance and rare earthquake, some part of the structure would get into plastic yield.In conclusion, anti-seismic performance of structure is evaluated, and feasible suggestion to further strengthen structure is proposed.