COLLAPSE LOADS OF REINFORCED-CONCRETE CYLINDRICAL WATER TANKS USING LIMIT ANALYSIS APPROACH

Evaluation of the margin of safety against collapse of reinforced conc rete cylindrical water tanks requires knowledge about the load carryin g capacity of the tanks. The limit analysis procedure can be used to e stimate the collapse loads of cylindrical tanks. In this paper, determ ination of the collapse loads of reinforced concrete circular cylindri cal water tanks, having varying reinforcement along the height, by app lying the limit analysis approach is discussed. The relevant mathemati cal formulations and the details of the computer program TANK develope d for estimating the collapse loads of short, medium height and long c ylindrical tanks are presented. The formulations presented are general in nature and different distributions of hoop reinforcement along the height of the tank wall can be considered. The results obtained using this program are found to be in good agreement with those reported in the literature. Numerical results for example problems with different hoop reinforcement distributions are given.