The Effects of Uniform, Partial and Gradient Thermal Loadings on Cylindrical Steel Reservoirs using Finite Elements Approach

Circular reservoirs are used in oil, water and wheat grains storage systems extensively. Beside the hydrostatic pressure and seismic load, thermal load is one of the important loads in design procedure of cylindrical reservoirs. Usually, thermal load is applied as a uniform load on wall and roof but in some design codes it is mentioned to apply the effects of gradient thermal load due to angle variation of sunshine through a days and seasons in Analysis and design approach. In this paper by using finite element modeling of cylindrical steel reservoirs, two types of thermal load such as constant, gradient as a function of radius-angle have been applied and induced displacements and stresses are investigated respectively. In order to evaluate aforementioned parameters, different models with various ratios of height to diameter selected and for all models the reservoirs volume is assumed to be constant. All consequences and results are discussed and displayed in separate graphs