Wind loads on fixed-roof cylindrical tanks with very low aspect ratio

Wind tunnel tests are conducted to investigate the wind loads on vertical fixed-roof cylindrical tanks with a very low aspect ratio of 0.275, which is a typical ratio for practical tanks with a volume of 100,000 m3. Both the flat-roof tank and the dome-roof tank are investigated in present study. The first four moments of the measured wind pressure, including the mean and normalized deviation pressure, kurtosis and skewness of the pressure signal, are obtained to study the feature of the wind loads. It is shown that the wind loads are closely related to the behavior of flow around the structure. For either tank, the mean wind pressures on the cylinder are positive on the windward area and negative on the sides and the wake area, and the mean wind pressures on the whole roof are negative. The roof configurations have no considerable influence on the mean pressure distributions of cylindrical wall in general. Highly non-Gaussian feature is found in either tank. Conditional sampling technique, envelope method, and the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) analysis are employed to investigate the characteristics of wind loads on the cylinder in more detail. It is shown that the patterns of wind pressure obtained from conditional sampling are similar to the mean pressure patterns.An instantaneous pressure coefficient can present a wide range from the maximum value to the minimum value. The quasi-steady assumption is not valid for structures considered in this paper according to the POD analysis.