ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF A MULTI COMPARTMENT CENTRAL CONE CEMENT STORING SILO

Abstract

Silos have been used since a very long time for the purpose of storage of various materials such as wheat, rice husk, cement and fly ash. They have been proved to be very effective in the process of storing materials and hence grew in demand as the industry progressed. But one of the major constraints faced by storage structures all throughout the world, is its increased rate of failures. This has been accounted to various reasons such as wrong computations of the analytical pressures acting on the walls of the silo and the effect of the entire pressure of the stored material on the base or hopper region of the silo. To counter this, certain inclusions were made to the structure, namely multi compartments and a central cone. Through the analysis of the structure after the inclusion of the internal cone and multi compartments, it is seen that the stresses act in a uniform manner throughout the structure and are also within the permissible range of -1.59 N/mm 2 to -0.181 N/mm 2 . Further, by the introduction of multi compartments in the silo and an internal inverted cone, pressure is uniformly distributed throughout the structure, which prevents an excess of pressure in any one particular area of the silo which causes it to fail. Design of the various components of the silo such as external walls, internal multi compartment internal walls, ring beam, internal cone and mat foundation, considering the critical moments and critical pressures obtained from the analysis.