Investigations of the hot granular material effect on steel silo

Abstract

When the hot granular material is placed in a steel silo, there will be significant thermal effects on bending moment, shear force and stress of the silo wall. But there is no feasible method to identify the stress and deformation of the silo with hot granular material. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an analytical method based on the cylindrical shell theory. A case study is performed to demonstrate the accuracy and feasibility of the analytical method. The results show that the proposed method produces satisfactory results when comparing with the finite element method. Besides, it can be seen from the analysis that large radial displacement occurs in the middle height of the silo wall when the hot granular material is placed in. Afterwards, the parametric studies are conducted to investigate the structural behaviors of the silo under different conditions that produces useful information for considering thermal effects in silo design. The research findings show that the length of the transition zone, the vertical temperature differential and the ratio of radius to thickness significantly influence the thermal stresses, which should be paid attention to in practical engineering design.