Unsymmetrically Loaded Cylindrical Tank on Elastic Foundation

Abstract

The analysis of axisymmetric shells of arbitrary shapes subjected to arbitrary loading has attracted considerable attention. If one considers the Fourier series of the circumference direction of loads and displacements, an axisymmetric tank subjected to a nonaxisymmetric load can be treated as a 1D problem. This paper combines the foundation and element stiffness matrices to make a circular plate element resting on an elastic foundation. This finite-element stiffness matrix is then converted into a transfer matrix to reduce the unknown quantity of the degrees of freedom of the element, no matter how many elements the shell structure has. Nonaxisymmetrically loaded cylindrical tanks resting on an elastic foundation are analyzed by the transfer matrix method. The calculated results of the proposed method to the nonaxisymmetrically loaded cylindrical tanks on an elastic foundation surprisingly reduced the degrees of freedom compared with the existing method.