Effect of Support Width on Stress Resultants in Ring Beams Interacting with Silo Shells: Fid-Bau Portal

Effect of Support Width on Stress Resultants in Ring Beams Interacting with Silo Shells

Zeybek, Özer / Topkaya, Cem

ABSTRACTElevated cylindrical metal silos are often supported on a ring beam which rests on discrete column supports. The ring beam plays an important role in redistributing the majority of the discrete forces from the column supports into a more uniform stress state in the cylindrical wall, which is necessary to reduce the potential for buckling of the shell wall. Traditional design treatments for ring beams assumed that the ring is supported by knife‐edge supports and is under the action of a uniformly distributed transverse loading. The interaction between the silo shell and the ring beam is generally neglected. Previous studies have shown that the stress resultants in ring beams depend strongly on the silo shell to ring beam stiffness ratio. This new study explores the effects of different support widths on the stress resultants and transverse displacements. Pursuant to this goal, a finite element parametric study has been conducted to evaluate stress resultants for different support width to radius ratios and considering different combinations of ring beams interacting with silo shells of differing dimensions. The results indicate that the width of the support has a very significant influence on the stress resultants and transverse displacements. These response quantities decrease significantly as the support width is increased from a knife‐edge to a finite width support. An increase in the support width directly reduces the ring beam clear span which in turn results in a reduction in all the key responses. Designers often ignore the effect of a finite support width but these findings indicate that this is a very conservative choice. A simplified treatment based on the clear span and the shell to ring beam stiffness ratio has been developed herein for calculating the stress resultants.