ANALYSIS OF FLUID STORAGE TANKS INCLUDING FOUNDATION-SUPERSTRUCTURE INTERACTION USING DIFFERENTIAL QUADRATURE METHOD

A differential quadrature solution for the flexural behavior of a cyli ndrical storage tank resting on an isotropic elastic soil medium is pr esented. The interface between the plate foundation and the soil half space is considered to be perfectly smooth and continuous. Zeros of Le gendre polynomials are taken as the quadrature points. The procedure a utomatically fits a polynomial of a degree one less than the number of points considered to model the expected response. The procedure accou nts for the interaction between the tank wall and the plate foundation using slope and moment compatibility. It also accounts for the intera ction between the plate foundation and the soil medium using the conta ct stress equation for the elastic half space. The results obtained co mpare well with the finite element analysis of a similar problem, but with much less computational efforts. Results of a parametric study ar e also presented to demonstrate the effect of the various geometric an d material parameters on the flexural response of the system. (C) 1997 by Elsevier Science Inc.