Design procedure for stiffened water-filled steel conical tanks

Since the collapse of the steel liquid-filled conical tank located in Fredericton, Canada in December 1990, a concern has been raised about the safety of existing tanks. In a previous investigation, it was shown that welding longitudinal stiffeners to the bottom part of hydrostatically loaded conical tanks would provide a significant enhancement to the buckling capacity of this type of shell structure. In the current study, an attempt is made to develop a simple procedure that can be used in designing stiffened conical tanks. The procedure is based on the theory of orthotropic shells and design formulae for unstiffened tanks previously developed by Vandepitte. udy is conducted numerically using an in-house developed shell element model to simulate both the walls of the tank and the stiffeners. The study considers stiffening existing tanks and the design of newly stiffened ones. As the application of the orthotropic theory depends on the ratio between the stiffener spacing and the shell thickness, limiting values for such a ratio have been evaluated and are presented graphically. The orthotropic design procedure is then described and applied in two examples involving a retrofitted as well as a newly designed stiffened conical tanks.