Elephant Foot Buckling and Retrofitting of Steel Thin Walled Cylindrical Shells Using FRP Composite Materials

Steel tanks designed in cylindrical forms are one of the shell structures which are widely used in industrial facilities. In geometric terms, these tanks have a very small thickness compared to the other dimensions and thus are categorized as thin walled structures which should consider the buckling failures. The buckling failure of tanks containing liquids is possible in various modes. In this paper instability of cylindrical shell wall which occurs under simultaneous loading of axial compression and high internal pressure, is considered. This instability generally occurs near the base. The present study demonstrates that increasing the internal pressure and the yielding of the wall near the base, decreases flexural stiffness and increases the local displacement of the cylindrical shells. In other words, the resultant circumferential membrane stress increases and inelastic buckling occurs. This instability near the base is known as “Elephant Foot Buckling”. This paper provides a proposal for strengthening cylindrical shells against elephant foot buckling using FRP. Some efforts have been done on this subject [1-3]. The aim of this paper is to investigate the strengthening of thin metallic cylindrical shells by local application of FRP to increase the elephant’s foot buckling strength. Finite element analysis of shells has been used in the present paper in order to obtain the effect of strengthening tanks using FRP on the increase of elephant foot buckling resistance. In order to achieve the behavior of cylindrical shell when being strengthened by FRP, accurate modeling of composite fibers and adhesive has been applied, and its appropriate dimensions and locations are presented.