Computer-aided Design Program Development Of Ground-supported Round Steel Silos

Ground-supported steel silo is a vertical storage container that is commonly used to store cement, fly ash, grain and other loose materials, in agriculture, chemicals, mining, metallurgy, electricity and many other industries. Most steel silos are rolled or assembled with thin-walled steel sheets. Steel silo has a very complicated mechanical behavior and failure criteria as a thin-walled shell structure. At present, several national computer programs are available to design ground-supported round steel silos, but the computer programs that can design directly ground and foundation of ground-supported steel round silos hasn’t seen at home. In China, there is no integrated software for silo roof, silo wall, ground and foundation of ground-supported steel round silos, design of ground-supported round steel silo stays in this stage of manual design and low automation.This study provides a comprehensive, accurate and efficient method to design silo roof, silo wall, ground and foundation of ground-supported round steel silos by national and international codes and datas. In addition, SSCAD1.0 (STEEL SILO CAD) is developed based on Visual Lisp language under AutoCAD platform which is a computer-aided design and drawing program for ground-supported round steel silos.The specific functions are as follows:(1)The module of silo roof and wall is used for inputting information, calculation, design and check of silo roof and wall.(2)The module of ground and foundation is used for inputting information, calculation and check of ground, calculation and design of different kinds of foundations(flatform foundation, pile foundation and shell foundation).(3)The module of post-processing is used for drawing and calculation text outputting by reading the geometrical date in pre-processing.The program of SSCAD1.0 is simple, practical and easily performed. It can not only liberate engineers from repetitive work by reducing designers’repetitive calculating and drawing but also optimize the design of ground-supported steel silos.Finally, the accuracy of the program is validated by compareing the calculation results fromthe program with those obtained from the finite element analysis. The program is accurate and can meet the requirements of projects.