Fluid-Structure Interaction Analysis Of Liquid Storage Tank

Storage tank is a common structure existing in the military industry, oil industry, chemical industry, electric power industry and so forth, and is widely used to store materials which can be combustible, explosive, and poisonous. Destruction of the storage tank due to earthquake or explosion will cause substantial damage of economy and can trigger secondary disaster. Therefore, the study on the seismic response of vertical storage tank has important theoretical significances and considerable practical applications.In this thesis, the interaction between the storage tank and foundation was not taken into account. For the storage tanks made from different materials, the shaking table test and finite element analysis were conducted to analyze the fluid-structure interaction as follow:(1) A computational model of storage tank made from plexiglass was developed in the FEM program ANSYS to analyze the diverse dynamic patterns of storage tank at different water levels, including sloshing modal, free damping test, fluid-structure interaction under periodic excitation, and dynamic characterizations under random excitation. The results obtained from the numerical modeling, for instance, the sloshing modal, the peak value of pressure under the periodic excitation, and time history of pressure under random excitation, were consistent with which obtained from the scaled lab testing, which verified the validity of the computational model.(2) A second computational model of storage tank using composite was also developed, and the self-vibration characteristics were analyzed at different water levels. In addition, according to the test data from the lab testing, the comparison of time histories of strain at different locations indicated that the characteristics of dynamic response of the scaled storage tank model in the lab testing provided the consistent test results to that obtained from the computational model.