Response of a building structure due to sloshing effect in an overhead water tank

Abstract

Sloshing is a violent resonant fluid motion in a water tank or any other tank containing liquid. When a fluid moves and interacts with its container, the dynamic pressures of such interaction may cause large deformation in the container wall as well as the supporting structure, which results in failure of the tank. From the available literatures on water tank and sloshing effects on the tank, it was found that, an oscillation of the liquid, may result in negative effects such as deformations and ruptures of the tank walls due to impact. From the literatures, it has been observed that when the earthquake occurs, the tank moves dynamically creating a sloshing effect on the tank’s surface and creating impact loads over the structural parts of the tank, especially on the walls of the tank, generating more stresses and ultimately resulting in critical failure. But at the same time very less work was carried out on the response of the structure due to the sloshing effect in an overhead water tank for pure water inside condition for various a/H ratios (a-height of water inside tank and H-Height of the tank).In the literatures impact loading is not considered, It could be considered along with sloshing effect on structure. According to the various literatures that have been studied in this paper, the study for the creation of structural control devices to manage sloshing has received significant attention recently, particularly focused on reducing the effects of earthquake and wind actions, and it was found that Tuned Liquid Dampers are helpful in this regard. Few of the researchers analyzed various earthquakes, namely, El Centro earthquake, Bhuj earthquake, Washington earthquake, and values of deflections, bending moments, shear forces, base shear values, displacement values, etc., were studied and compared. Even few authors investigated soil-structure interaction and how the sloshing affects the behavior of tank concluding that in stiff soil, effect of sloshing on responses is more. This study is aimed at the gaps that have been made in literature and suggests carry out the analysis for checking the response of a building structure finding due to the sloshing effect in an overhead water tank. This work proposes that, the tank design must be carried out by considering and analyzing the dynamic response of a structure during sloshing, comparing the response of the structure against impact loads, temperature stresses, and other critical loads during sloshing of the water tank by using computational fluid dynamics and response spectrum method or time history method. Also, experimental analysis (shake table analysis) should be carried out to validate the simulation results with the theoretical calculations in terms of displacement, base shear, and the time period.