Introduction of Air Cushion to Reduce Seismic Demand in Cylindrical Water Storage Tanks

Water storage tanks not designed explicitly for seismic loading could require retrofit. One of the common ways of retrofit include some structural change in the lateral load resisting system that could be expensive and requires the tank to be out of service for relatively long time. This paper introduces a novel method to reduce seismic demand on tank’s wall without structural intervention. This is done by employing air cushions adjacent to the wall. The paper investigates the effect of air cushion system on the seismic response of the cylindrical water storage tanks. While in tank without air cushion, the boundary condition adjacent to tank wall is kinematic with no control on the wall pressure, in the proposed method this boundary condition becomes kinetic, enabling control of dynamic fluid pressure on the tank walls. The response parameters of the tank is developed in terms of wall pressure, wave height, base shear, and overturning moment in cylindrical tanks of different sizes with and without air cushions under the far field and near source ground motions. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is an effective way to reduce sloshing force demand.