In flat-based liquid storge tanks such as oil storage tanks with no anchor, up lift that a part of the bottom plate separates from its base occurs during earthquake excitation. This phenomenon sometimes causes tank collapse, that is, crack at the bottm-shell corner or buckling at the lower part of the shell plate. To make this up lifting mechanism clear is very important for the seismic design of liquid storage tanks, and not less reports on this problem have been published. But the mechanism is so complex that any of them presents neither a sufficient solution nor a well established design practice. One of the reasons is that the tank models used hitherto in their experiments do not satisfy physical similarity to Buckingham's law, and that the results can not be used directly as the data for actual large-scaled tanks.
From this standpoint, we carried out a static tilt test with two tank models satisfying perfectly the similitude law. The models were made of polyethylene film, and to satisfy the similality they were reduced to 1/40 scale. One model (MODEL-A) had 488mm diameter, 488mm water depth, 0.36mm shell plate thickness and 0.28 annular plate thickness. Another one (MODEL-B) was 1220mm×488mm 0.54mm×0.36mm. Rigidity of the plates was too weak to measure strains, and we measured only displacements. Three 15mm thick rubber plates were used as the model of foundation, and in order to investigate the influence of foundation stiffness upon the tank up-lifting behavior we added experiments with various types of foundation. And the influence of the top roof was investigated, too.
Through the test we got the data corresponding to actual tanks, and found that up lifting mechanism was not only concerned with the lower part of the tank, but also with the whole of the tank.
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