STUDY ON THE FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCIES OF RECTANGULAR CONCRETE TANKS USING FEM AND ANALYTICAL CODES

Impulsive and convective frequencies are one of the most important subjects for evaluation of the seismic behavior of tanks. These two frequencies are defined by Housner and used for obtaining Rayleigh damping in time history analysis. ACI 350 and NZSEE standards have suggested some analytical solutions for finding convective and impulsive frequencies. These frequencies can also extract from modal analysis by finite element (FE) software. In current study, these frequencies are extracted by using FE software and performing modal analysis. Also these modes are compared with analytical methods from ACI and NZSEE standards. Based on the results, convective frequencies obtained from FE and ACI and NZSEE methods are so close together, with just two percent variation between FE and analytical codes, while there are significant differences among these methods for impulsive frequencies. Furthermore, this study shows that the wall thickness has no effect on the convective frequencies, while it is completely opposite for impulsive frequency. When the wall thickness rises by 1.5 times, impulsive frequencies increase by 1.75, 1.55 and 1.48 times for finite element, NZSEE and ACI methods, respectively. In addition, based on the observations, when the liquid height is low, NZSEE method presents high values of impulsive frequency.