Abstract
High bending stresses occur in the shell-to-annular joint of a cylindrical storage tank due to the hydrostatic pressure and the plastic region grows around the toe of a fillet weld. Because of the cyclic loading by the contained liquid, low cycle fatigue evaluation is required. This paper describes the axisymmetric elastoplastic analysis by the finite element method for this evaluation. In this analysis, the vicinity of the shell-to-annular joint is modeled by solid elements, other members of a tank are modeled by shell elements, the connection element which is formulated by the penalty method is used. The constitutive equation is based on the combined hardening in order to consider both strain hardening and the Bauschinger effect.
