Case Study: Numerical Analysis of Collapsed Steel Tower Silo to Quantify the Design Safety Factors

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Civil Engineering, Military Technical College, Cairo 11865, Egypt.

10.21608/iugrc.2021.246217

Abstract

Design of strategic structures like tower wheat silos must be treated with cautious consideration, the design must be reliable to assure the structure will not fail even under rare incidents. for the current case study: a recently constructed single tower silo failed after a sudden wheat leakage that occurred from its mid-height, the collapse caused a progressive failure for an adjacent silo structure as well as serious damage for a third attached one, the site investigation clarified that many essential monitoring sensors have malfunctioned. The objective of this work is to quantify the design safety factors if satisfactory or not. In this paper, the leaked tower silo is numerically simulated using ANSYS FE package, the bolted steel rings of silo walls are modeled using shell elements, the vertical stiffeners used to hold the silo walls in place are simulated using solid elements, the design loading cases are applied, the structure is analyzed, and the design is rechecked based on the same used Euro code provisions. The margin of safety factors is normalized for every steel vertical ring. The results showed that leakage started to occur at the assembly point of minimum margin of safety. The work concluded that designers have to adjust an adequate margin of safety based on their expertise for local site conditions

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