Influence of patch-load metal silos with corrugated walls

Abstract

Silos are widely used in food industries to store different types of agricultural products. Loads exerted by the stored material on silo walls are critical in the design of the shell structure. Eurocode standard represents these loads by means of symmetrical pressure distributions and unsymmetrical pressure distributions, this latter named patch-load. In this paper, the structural effects of the patch load are investigated. A 3D FEM model has been developed to model cylindrical flat bottom silos made of corrugated steel walls. Firstly, silos were modelled only with the effect of the symmetrical pressure distributions. The structural effects at this stage were compared to those obtained in a second stage, where the patch-load was introduced in the model. The purpose of this research work was to understand the structural effects of the patch-load as described in the Eurocode, as well as validate analytical expressions to determine these effects more easily.