A Consideration on Nonlinear Sloshing of a Rectangular Liquid Storage Container Subjected to Seismic Excitations

Abstract

The liquid storage container (tank) is listed as one of the facilities, which are apt to be damaged by an earthquake in industrial facilities. As for seismic damages of containers, the sloshing phenomenon of the liquid free surface and the bulging phenomenon which is due to the interaction between the container structure rigidity and the liquid pressure become problems. Here, we investigate a nonlinear sloshing. There are many papers, in which the perturbation method using the small parameter, and the Galerkin’s method are applied as a method of the nonlinear analysis. However, in this paper, a modal method which superposes the linear solutions using Fourier series’ representation is proposed. Furthermore, this method is applied to the seismic response analysis on the nonlinear sloshing of a rectangular liquid storage container.