Abstract
With the growing demand of energy for recent decades, liquefied natural gas (LNG) has become one of the most significant energy sources due to the high calorific value and performances, as well as the ease of transportation and storage. Hence, many LNG tanks have been constructed to store liquefied nature gas and the roof of a LNG tank consists of reticulated shell, roof panel and concrete dome. The ribbed-type reticulated shell welded to the roof panel, which is called roof panel enhanced (RPE) reticulated shell in this paper, can be treated as the template during concrete dome casting. In addition, it also sustains the gravity load of concrete dome before concrete hardening and works together with concrete dome as a composite structure after concrete hardening. It is of significance to study the response of RPE reticulated shell during the construction stage. In the first part of this paper, the nonlinear load–deflection complete process analysis was carried out to study the buckling behavior of the RPE reticulated shell under uniformly distributed load. The effects of beam section size, rise-to-span ratio and the initial geometric imperfection magnitude on the buckling resistance of the RPE reticulated shell were investigated to optimize the current design. In the second part of this paper, the buckling behavior of the RPE reticulated shell under non-uniformly distributed load induced by concrete dome casting was studied and the air pressures of each construction step were determined by considering the response behaviors of the time-varying structures composed of RPE reticulated shell, concrete dome and changing load. The safety factors of the RPE reticulated shell were calculated under the appropriate air pressure and initial geometric imperfections, based on which, the original optimized design of the RPE reticulated shell was improved to reduce the material consumption.
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