Effect of Flexural and Membrane Stiffness on the Analysis of Floating Roofs

With the aim of extending the use of integrated variational principles on fluid and deckplate to the large deflection analysis of floating roofs, this paper investigates the significance of theflexural and membrane components in the formulations of the deck plate. Applying integratedvariational principles on deck plate and fluid facilitate the treatment of the compatibility ofdeformation between floating roof and supporting liquid. Analysis results showed that differentassumptions about deck plate formulation were commonly used in the literature which resulted inconsiderably different deflection and stress patterns on the floating roof. The results showed thatmodeling of the deck plate as a flexural element rather than membrane, by eliminating the need fornonlinear analysis, gave reasonable results for deflections and stresses in the deck plate. Finally, asimple and efficient procedure using linear finite element code analyzes of the floating roofs,considering only the flexural stiffness was developed.