Imperfection sensitivity to elastic buckling of wind loaded open cylindrical tanks

This paper considers the buckling and post-buckling behavior of empty metal storage tanks under wind load. The structures of such tanks may be idealized as cantilever cylindrical shells, and the structural response is investigated using a computational model. The modeling employs a doubly curved finite element based on a theory by Simo and coworkers, which is capable of handling large displacements and plasticity. Buckling results for tanks with four different geometric relations are presented to consider the influence of the ratios between the radius and the height of the shell (R/L), and between the radius and the thickness (R/t). The studies aim to clarify the differences in the shells regarding their imperfection-sensitivity. The results show that thin-walled short tanks, with R/L = 3, display high imperfection sensitivity, while tanks with R/L = 0.5 are almost insensitive to imperfections. Changes in the total potential energy of tanks that would buckle under the same high wind pressures are also considered.