Seismic responses of hyperbolic cooling towers under horizontal and vertical earthquake

Following the dynamic property analysis and elaboration, linear response spectrum analysis (RSA) and response history analysis (RHA) were conducted on a representative hyperbolic cooling towers (HCT) in present study. The seismic responses in tower shell were illustrated in detail, including the internal force amplitude, modal contribution, influence from damping ratio, comparison of results got from RSA and RHA and especially the latitude distributions of internal forces. The results show that the eigenmodes could be classified in a new method into four types according to their mode shapes and only the lateral bending modes and vertical stretching modes are meaningful for horizontal and vertical earthquake correspondingly. The bending modes and seismic deformation display the same feature which is global lateral bending accompanied by minute circular flow displacement of section. This feature also decides the latitude distributions of internal forces as sine or cosine. Moreover, the following method is also proposed for approximate estimation of internal force amplitudes without time-consuming response history analysis: getting the response spectrums of the selected ground accelerations and then comparing values of response spectrums at the natural period of first lateral bending mode because it is always prime dominant for horizontal seismic responses.