Effect of soil-structure interaction on the reliability of hyperbolic cooling towers

A semi-stochastic process model of reliability was established for hyperbolic cooling towers subjected to combined loadings of wind force, self-weight, temperature loading. Effect of the soil-structure interaction on reliability was evaluated. By involving the gust factor, an equivalent static scheme was employed to convert the dynamic model to static model. The TR combination rule was used to consider relations between load responses. An analysis example was made on the 90M cooling tower of Maoming, Guangdong of China. Numerical results show that the design not including interaction turns to be conservative.