FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF COLUMN SUPPORTED HYPERBOLIC COOLING-TOWERSUSING SEMI-LOOF SHELL AND BEAM ELEMENTS

In most of the early works related to the analysis of hyperbolic cooli ng; towers, under either dead or the wind loads, only the tower shell was considered in the analysis and a continuous boundary condition in the form of fixity of the base of the shell was considered. However, t he tower shell is supported by columns in the form of A-frames. In ord er to consider realistic boundary conditions, it is essential to consi der the supporting columns in the analysis along with the shell. The p resent study considers this problem and an attempt has been made to re present the tower shell by semi-roof shell elements and the supporting columns by semi-loof beam elements, The column ends are assumed to be fixed at their bases. The analysis has been carried out for only the dead load. The results have been found to compare with those of Gould 'Finite Element Analysis of Shells of Revolution', Pitman, London, 198 4, and lyer and Appa Rao 'Studies of stress concentration at shell-col umn junctions of hyperboloid cooling towers', Comp. Struct., 1990, 34, 191-20. Hoop forces have been found to have altered significantly in the lower portion of the shell near the column-shell junction. Moreove r, the proposed model gives a better physical representation of a colu mn supported hyperbolic cooling tower. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.