Cylindrical steel tanks are important components of many industrial plants such as oil refineries and chemical plants. Usually failure of cylindrical tanks leads to serious consequences. During the past earthquakes such as 1964 Alaska and 1999 Turkey seismic performance of cylindrical tanks revealed that tanks are seismically vulnerable. Therefore, evaluation of seismic performance of these structures is an important task in seismic prone areas. During an earthquake, a Sloshing motion may occur in upper parts of the liquid. In storage tanks during earthquake if fluid wave height in tank increases, the fluid wave may damage the roof or some parts of roof holders. The tanks should resist against unfavourable impacts such as earthquakes. In this paper, 5 tanks with different H/D ratios in an oil refinery complex in Iran were studied using static and dynamical analysis (linear and non-linear). Spectrum and time history linear and non-linear analysis was completed in order to find the fluid wave height and also ratio of wave height to the tank diameter.

The objective of this article is to study the effect of various components of earthquake on Sloshing response of liquid storage tanks. First, commonly used theory for unidirectional analysis of liquid behavior in cylindrical tanks was reviewed. Second, the Finite Element Modeling (FEM) strategy which was used to simulate dynamic response of the liquid tank system was described. The FEM was validated using a set of experimental measurements reported by previous researchers. Third, a parametric study for some vertical, cylindrical tanks with different aspect ratios excited by various time series of earthquake accelerations was performed. Each tank was subjected to unidirectional and bidirectional excitations of earthquake accelerations. Fourth, provision suggested by some seismic codes for the estimation of Maximum Sloshing Wave height (MSWH) were reviewed and the accuracy of the codes prediction was numerically investigated. Finally, the available simplified formulation for evaluating MSWH under unidirectional excitation was extended for bidirectional excitation.

In this paper, the fluid characteristics of pitching Sloshing under microgravity condition are investigated. A numerical method by solving the Navier-Stokes equations to study three-dimensional (3-D) nonlinear liquid Sloshing is developed with OpenFOAM, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool. The computational method is validated against existing experimental data in rectangular tank under ordinary gravitational field. However under low gravity conditions, the Sloshing liquid shows seemingly chaotic behavior and a considerable volume of liquid attaches on the sidewall due to the effect of surface tension, which is verified in simulation experiment. Besides, the nonlinear liquid behaviors in hemi-spherically bottom tank are firstly studied in this paper. It is found that the wave evolution becomes divergent with the decrease of gravitational acceleration. The natural frequency reaches a constant magnitude quickly with the increase of liquid height and then increases again until the filling level exceeds 70%. Meanwhile, the liquid dynamics of forced pitching Sloshing under resonant and off-resonant condition are demonstrated respectively. The numerical techniques for 3-D simulation are hopeful to provide valuable guidance for efficient liquid management in space.

This study aimed to explore the seismic responses of the water-filled prestressed concrete cylindrical tanks. To this end, a number of dynamic-explicit studies are carried out in order to investigate the implications that the water Sloshing phenomenon has on the behavior of the prestressed concrete tank when it is subjected to earthquake inputs. Using previous research demonstrates that our numerical analysis is capable of representing the Sloshing waves. In addition, a shaking table test is carried out to verify the accuracy of the numerical analysis. The main highlight of the numerical simulation method is to consider all components and elaborate detailing of prestressed tanks. The novelty of this study is to model the 3D Sloshing of the liquid in the prestressed concrete tanks. Comparing the experimental and numerical results demonstrates a reasonable agreement between them. Also, in this research, the dynamic-explicit method is applied accompanying the Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) adaptive meshing to enhance the numerical model for nonlinear Sloshing wave simulation. An experiment is performed on a prestressed concrete containment sample in the shaking table of the Amirkabir University of Technology to assess the efficiency of numerical analysis. The numerical results show the robustness of the water simulation method in which almost shows realistic motions of water mass points in the ALE method.

This study aims to consider the Sloshing height and hydrodynamic pressure in roofless and roofed liquid storage tanks utilizing a coupled FE-SPH technique. As a design technique for determining the necessary analyses and main parameters to reach reasonable results, the Taguchi method is used. The SPH formulation models the liquid concerning the large amplitude Sloshing waves, and the finite element method simulates the structure. At first, it is found that expressions presented in ACI 350.3-06 should be revised when calculating the Sloshing height in a rectangular tank. Secondly, when determining the hydrodynamic pressure applied on the roof and, also the Sloshing height, the frequency content of the input ground motion affects significantly the contained liquid responses. Comparison of the results obtained for roofed and roofless tanks indicate no clear correlation between their dynamic responses. The results of this study suggest the ratio of liquid height to its length, the length itself, and earthquake record PGA as noise parameters in Taguchi analysis. At last, the suggested Taguchi analysis’s main design parameters for future studies are the acceleration spectrum intensity ASI and the liquid’s height in the storage tank.

This study, investigates the factors impacting on Sloshing phenomenon of the tank structures including geometry, burial rate, and installation of T-shaped baffles under two different earthquake records. The results indicate that the tanks with larger dimensions will experience less Sloshing height. Moreover, length, height, and the freeboard, respectively, are effective in lowering the roof force. However, freeboard plays a more important role comparing with the burial rate of the tank in reducing the roof force. Note that as the freeboard and burial rate increase, the roof force decreases. The results represent that decreasing the height to length ratio of the tank reduces the maximum Sloshing height. Finally, using the energy dissipation ratio concept, it is observed that the tank with baffles shows much better performance with the energy dissipation ratio of about 96%, comparing with the burial approach in which even the tank under 100% burial rate just dissipates less than 50% the energy induced by the Sloshing waves.