Effect of Vertical Component of Earthquake on Concrete Storage Tanks with flexible walls Using Coupled Finite Element and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Method

In this research, Seismic behavior of concrete rectangular fluid tanks has been studied and the importance of the effect of the earthquake’s vertical component investigated. The structure of tank and medium of the water has been modeled using finite element and smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods respectively. The smooth particle hydrodynamics which is a meshfree method, has many advantages over other traditional grid-based methods. For verification purposes, the modeling accuracy compared with the available experimental and numerical results. The analysis ran under horizontal records with predominant periods in different ranges, once considering vertical component and another time without it. Afterwards, The parameters of sloshing height base shear, force in unit width and displacement of the wall has been obtained for comparison. The results show that consideration of vertical component in analysis has a negligible effect on sloshing response but it is significant on structure’s response. Meanwhile, the maximum sloshing occurs in analysis under horizontal record with high predominant period. Tanks with different thicknesses or in other words, different flexibilities of walls, show completely different sloshing and structure response. Also considering walls which are parallel to direction of earthquake as flexible, has significant effect on response of the structure. As a result, the effect of vertical component and flexibility of walls must be considered in seismic analysis of tanks.