Settlement beneath cylindrical shells

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them alone. It is also the only settlement mode that is relatively easy to predict in advance using the theories of soil mechanics. Complete failures of tanks due to settlement are not common, but failure of one tank in Japan (Bell and Iwakiri 1980) and of two tanks in Britain (Green and Hight 1974) were attributed to the fracture of welds in the tank oor. The circular plate which forms the tank oor is commonly assembled by welding a large number of small rectangular plates together (Fig. 4.2). If the welds in the base are stronger than the plate itself, then the plate has an extended hardening and stiffening response up to very large deformations, and rupture is unlikely to occur whilst the settlements are within any reasonable bounds. Recommendations for allowable values of base dishing settlements should therefore relate to weld fracture, as affected by the welding technique and inspection procedure (Crawford 1986). In their review paper, Marr et al. (1982) described a number of proposed relationships to limit the possibility of a failure by weld fracture. They recommended that the non-planar dish-shaped settlement umax of the bottom plate (Fig. 4.2) should be kept below umax = u2 0+ 3 f D 2 8 E M
1/2

(1)

in which u0 is the initial upward chamber of the tank oor, f is the ultimate stress of the weld detail used in the oor, E is Youngs modulus of elasticity, M is the factor of safety (commonly taken as M = 2 if rupture is possible), and D is the diameter of the tank. This expression may be derived by assuming the deformed shape of the base to be spherical and the strain in it to be uniform. They examined 30 case histories, including eight cases of bottom plate rupture. They found that their recommended criterion correlated well with the incidence of failure in service. Settlements beneath the tank wall: settlement components The second part of the settlement is settlement beneath the wall of the tank. The settlement displacements are always much smaller than base plate settlements, so that many publications have paid relatively little attention to wall settlement. However, it is not the absolute magnitude of displacements that matters, but their effect on the structure: quite small settlements in certain patterns can be very deleterious to the tank. It is difcult to predict the magnitudes of these differential settlements in advance using the theories of soil mechanics, but when a tank is already differentially settling, observations at different times can be most usefully employed to evaluate the likelihood that they will eventually lead to failure. However, a rational assessment of the consequences involves extensive calculation, as described below. First, the settlements beneath the wall must be resolved into different components, which have different effects. The largest component is normally a uniform settlement, and this rigid body translation does not affect the safety of the structure. The next largest component is normally a uniform tilt of the whole tank wall,