Water tower vessels, often in the form of truncated conical tanks, are prevalent worldwide. These structures are typically constructed from steel, with curved panels welded together both circumferentially and longitudinally to achieve the conical shape. The meridional and hoop stresses resulting from the loads sustained by those tanks often lead to buckling of the tank’s walls and/or base, resulting in catastrophic failures. While the stability of conical tanks under hydrostatic and seismic loads has been extensively investigated in a comprehensive research program led by the second author and their team, the impact of wind loads remains inadequately explored. This chapter presents a comparative study aimed at predicting wind pressure on a conical tank using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis conducted with ANSYS software, supplemented by the pointwise meshing tool and experimental wind tunnel tests. The study seeks to verify the accuracy of CFD simulations in predicting wind-induced pressures on the surface of conical tanks under wind conditions. A detailed description of the CFD simulation setup, including geometry modeling, mesh generation, boundary conditions, and turbulence modeling, is provided. The findings of the CFD simulations are compared with the available experimental data to evaluate the reliability and precision of the CFD approach in predicting wind pressure on conical tanks.

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CFD Prediction of Wind Pressures on Conical Tanks Based on a Wind Tunnel Test

  • Engy Abdelhadi,
  • Ashraf El-Damatty,
  • Ahmed Musa,
  • Ahmed Elansary

摘要

Water tower vessels, often in the form of truncated conical tanks, are prevalent worldwide. These structures are typically constructed from steel, with curved panels welded together both circumferentially and longitudinally to achieve the conical shape. The meridional and hoop stresses resulting from the loads sustained by those tanks often lead to buckling of the tank’s walls and/or base, resulting in catastrophic failures. While the stability of conical tanks under hydrostatic and seismic loads has been extensively investigated in a comprehensive research program led by the second author and their team, the impact of wind loads remains inadequately explored. This chapter presents a comparative study aimed at predicting wind pressure on a conical tank using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis conducted with ANSYS software, supplemented by the pointwise meshing tool and experimental wind tunnel tests. The study seeks to verify the accuracy of CFD simulations in predicting wind-induced pressures on the surface of conical tanks under wind conditions. A detailed description of the CFD simulation setup, including geometry modeling, mesh generation, boundary conditions, and turbulence modeling, is provided. The findings of the CFD simulations are compared with the available experimental data to evaluate the reliability and precision of the CFD approach in predicting wind pressure on conical tanks.