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Jim Durack has a background in both academic and practicing engineering. He has worked with Aurecon
(formerly Connell Wagner) for the last eight years and is currently on sabbatical leave completing an engineering
doctorate through University of Southern Queensland. Jim is a specialist in the design of industrial structures
for bulk materials handling facilities. He has also worked internationally on the design and assessment of
large inverted cone silos as used primarily in the cement production industry. In 2007 ABHR published Jims
article on the implications for such silos of the then new Eurocode for silo loads, EN1991-4. Since then he has
presented three further conference papers in this field. Both Jim and Professor Tranberg have been involved in
the development of the USQ coursework based, Online delivered, Master of Engineering that has a significant
emphasis on industrial and marine structures.
In preparation for a planned course on silo design, Jim has extended his reinforced concrete silo research to a
speculative investigation of a steel solution for large inverted cone silos. His knowledge and experience with
concrete silos gives him fresh insight into this complex field. Jim considers that there may be a fundamentally new
way of approaching steel silo design that is informed by the Eurocode but not limited by it. This paper provides
a relatively informal presentation of his ideas. He hopes that these may challenge steel silo designers to think
outside the square.
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have similar lessons for the designers of steel silos as he has found
it to have for reinforced concrete silos. The following represent
some key findings of this research:
For the design of steel silos, the Eurocode for silo loads EN1991
- 4 is supplemented by the general design code EN1993 - 1 - 6
Strength and Stability of Shell Structures and the silo specific
EN1993 - 4 1 Design of Seel Structures - Silos.
There is limited contemporary academic interest in the
analysis and design of reinforced concrete silos, but a huge
body of academic literature relating to various aspects of the
structural behaviour of steel silos. Much of the literature is
highly specialised in nature and of limited direct relevance
to practicing designers.
Professor Michael Rotter is apparently the most highly published academic working in the steel silo field. He has played a
leading role in the development of all three Eurocodes relevant
to silo design.
Professor Rotter has published a text Guide for the Economic
Design of Circular Metal Silos. This text is specifically directed
to practicing silo designers. First published in 2001 it represents a general guide to steel silo design plus specific guidance
related to the application of the three silo Eurocodes.
Durack has reported that for reinforced concrete silos, the Eurocode for silo loading is more conservative than earlier codes
by a factor in excess of 1.5. No such comparative review for
steel silos has been identified in the published literature.
Rotters text and the codes it supports are typical of code specified design methods. They allow a designer to undertake a design assessment of a proposed steel silo but they provide only
limited assistance in developing the form of understanding that
a designer needs in order to exercise responsible creativity in
achieving a reliable and economic design solution for a particular steel silo application.
The research focuses on a 12 500 tonne capacity cement storage inverted cone silo with a diameter of 18 metres and a storage
chamber height of 40 metres. This silo is not typical of most steel
silos that are likely to use a concentric discharge system and to
be smaller and more slender. The case study silo has been chosen
because of the authors interest in reinforced concrete silos of
these proportions.
It should be noted that applicability of the Eurocode for silo
loading specifically excludes the inverted cone discharge system
that is common in the cement industry. This discharge system uses
an inverted cone at the base of the silo that sheds the stored material to sequentially operated discharge points located around the
silo perimeter. Despite this, the research is generally relevant to
the design of a steel silo of any sort.
Figure 1 Basic silo details and a graphic illustration of the internal pressure on the silo walls.
Figure 2 The decomposition of the Eurocode load into uniform and dierential components.
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Graph 1 demonstrates that the stiffness of the ring is highly non linear, exhibiting a huge increase in stiffness as the load
increases and the ring moves to the compliant shape. (Durack
has reported on field measurement of the radial deformations
of a 10 000 tonne reinforced concrete silo during discharge
and the use of these measurements to infer the magnitude of
the loading necessary to cause such deformations. One consequence of the non linear tension stiffening behaviour is that
this form of field testing cannot be used to determine unstiffened steel silo wall pressures. As indicated in Graph 1, if the
measured radial displacement is say between 350 and 360 mm
then the pressures causing this displacement could be anywhere corresponding to that for a load factor between 0.1 and
2.5. Despite this limitation, the method should be excellent
for determining pressure ratios in the different flow zones.)
Thirdly, the statement following Equation (3) states that
once the ring reaches the compliant shape, the combined load
is carried by hoop tension rather than by bending. This is not
entirely correct. In moving to the compliant shape, bending
curvatures obviously must develop in order for the radii to
change to the required values. It may readily be shown that
the bending curvatures necessary to establish the compliant
radii in the flow and shoulder zones are given as:
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For feasible steel plate thicknesses and the non uniform Eurocode loading, there is a good correlation between the predictions of simple hoop tension theory and results obtained
from FE modelling.
A steel silo is dependent for its equilibrium on moving towards
the compliant shape. Linear static analysis that assesses equilibrium in the undeformed position (with a perfect circular
shape) will not give any meaningful prediction of the actual
behaviour of the silo. All of the previous FE results are based
on geometry non linear analysis.
The Eurocode loading will cause large radial deformations of
an unstiffened steel silo. These large deformations develop at
quite low load factors but as the load increases they reach a
maximum value beyond which they will not further increase.
Increasing the wall thickness of a silo will not significantly
reduce the magnitude of radial deformations (until the thickness reaches very large values more typical of a reinforced
concrete silo).
For a given non uniform load combination, increasing the wall
thickness of a silo will increase the total combined axial and
bending stress. A maximum stress in excess of the yield stress
should not be taken as an indication that the silo is approaching failure. It simply means that with thicker plates, some degree of yield may be necessary to allow the silo to move to the
compliant shape.
For low loads a silo will exhibit very low stiffness but as soon
as it approaches the compliant shape the stiffness will radically increase. For this reason it may be difficult to obtain convergence of an FE solution for the first low increments of loading.
The hoop tension force varies around the perimeter of the silo
from 968 to 1252 kN/m. The average of these two figures is
very close to the constant hoop tension in the two dimensional
ring of 1107 kN/m.
The maximum and minimum plate stresses (at the surface of
the plate) are 247 MPa and - 163 MPa compared to those for the
two dimensional ring of 236 MPa and 148 MPa.
Figure 6 Aspects of the behaviour of the Figure 5 silo focussing on the ring level.
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Figure 7 Vertical wall stresses due to uniform and dierential vertical traction taken separately.
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The magnitude and extent of vertical stresses shown in Figure 8 is of great design significance as it has already been identified that in the flow zone where the compression stresses are
high, the horizontal pressures cause a local increase in the silo
wall radius as it moves towards the compliant shape. As discussed below this causes a reduction in the buckling capacity of
the wall in this region.
Recall that the Euler critical lateral buckling stress for an ideal
axially loaded column with length l and radius of gyration r is:
cr = 2E / [ (l/r) 2 ]
(9)
Now a very tall and slender silo could buckle laterally in this
fashion but it is much more common for a silo to exhibit local
buckling with a buckling shape as illustrated in Figure 9.
Figure 9 Typical buckling mode shapes for uniform and non uniform loading.
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9. Design comparison
To explore the potential advantages of the silo illustrated in Figure 10 (b) compared to the simpler reference silo of Figure 10
(a), a design assessment was undertaken for the two silos. Both
silos were taken as being of Grade 450 steel with elastic plastic
behaviour using the Von Mises yield criterion and with E = 200
x 103 MPa and Poissons ratio = 0.25. Both silos were of identical
geometry and subject to the same loading defined in Figure 2.
A decision was made to use a form of design by advanced
analysis using geometry and material non linear analysis. The
primary decisions necessary for such design assessment involve
setting the magnitude and shape of the imperfections to be incorporated in the analysis model and the choice of an appropriate failure criterion to identify the collapse load. Such decisions
require extensive sensitivity analyses and comparative trialling
against other accepted design methods. The following decisions
were adopted with limited trialling and are intended only to allow for rational comparison of the stiffened and unstiffened silos
on an equal basis.
The nominal geometric construction tolerance on the silo radius was taken as being +/- 30 mm with a magnifier of 3.0 to include for non geometric imperfections such as residual stresses.
Thus the maximum deviation from a perfect cylinder prior to
load application was 90 mm. The deformation due to the non uniform loads is not included as an imperfection as this deformation
is determined directly by the geometry and material non linear
analysis. The shape of the imperfections was different for each
silo being set to that corresponding to the lowest mode buckling
shape for each silo subject to the uniform traction load only but
with an initially deformed shape corresponding to the full Eurocode load.
The failure criterion was taken as the load beyond which a
convergent solution was no longer obtained. This represents a
non conservative failure criterion and some might argue for a
more conservative criterion such as first yield but it has already
been identified that for steel silos that must adopt their compliant shape, yield is not a good indicator of an approaching failure
mechanism.
It was found that both silos reached convergence for Load
Factors up to 3.2 with no convergent solutions beyond this point.
Figure 11 compares the Von Mises strain at the outer surface of
the silo for load factors of 1.67 and 3.2. The plotting range for
strain is limited to the yield strain for Grade 450 steel so white
regions represents regions where yield has developed at the plate
surface.
In principle, a load factor of 1.5 / 0.9 = 1.67 represents the
minimum necessary load factor for code compliance. At this load
factor there is no yield in the heavier unstiffened silo and only
small regions of yield for the lighter stiffened silo. With this slight
exception, both silos achieve the necessary collapse load as assessed using the very conservative first yield failure criterion.
At a load factor of 3.2 as must be expected, the thinner stiffened silo, with extensive regions of yield, is working harder than
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KEY REFERENCES
Durack, J. McKay, H. 2007. Implications of the new Eurocode EN1991-4
to cement and raw meal silo design. Australian Bulk Handling Review
Vol 12 Nos 2 and 3.
Durack, J. McKay, H. 2007. Measured wall movements during
discharge compared to Eurocode predictions for an inverted cone silo.
International Bulk Materials Handling Conference. University of
Newcastle.
Durack, J. 2008. Observations of the performance of existing inverted
cone silos. Bulk Materials Handling Conference, Brisbane.
Durack, J. 2008. The analysis and design of reinforced concrete silos.
20th Australian Conference on the Mechanics of Structures and
Materials. University of Southern Queensland.
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