3D Sloshing of Concrete Cylindrical Tanks under Seismic Conditions

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.