An experimental and numerical study on seismic performance of cylindrical prestressed containment vessels

Prestressed cylindrical tanks are commonly utilized to store the large volume of water or other various fluids. The prestressed water tanks are used as a part of the fire-fighting system or water refinery process. In this article, the seismic responses of the prestressed concrete cylindrical tanks are investigated under earthquake inputs. A series of dynamic-explicit analyses are performed to study water sloshing phenomena effects on the prestressed concrete tank behavior using ABAQUS software. A shaking table test program is conducted to validate the numerical analysis. A cylindrical prestressed concrete tank was constructed and subjected to several seismic records. In addition, the numerical analysis capability to simulate the sloshing waves is verified using other research results. Several numerical models are prepared with different radius to water height ratios (R/H). The recorded El-Centro and Tabas accelerations are employed as seismic excitations in the numerical models. Comparisons of the experimental and numerical results demonstrate a reasonable agreement between them. The numerical analysis results demonstrates that the Arbitrary Eulerian-Lagrangian analysis method has a considerable capability to simulate the water sloshing. The seismic excitation effect on the tendons prestress loss is negligible in the investigated numerical models.