Determinación de un método simplificado para el diseño de anillos de viento en silos metálicos

For centuries, silos have been built for grain storage, but not until nineteenth century they were built for commercial purposes. Since then, its use has become more extensive, being of great importance for many agricultural and food industries. The structural advantages and relatively low costs have made steel silos an important alternative for the granular material storage. Circular shape steel silos are among the most economical, but its design must take into account non-uniform pressures due to wind loads. Wind loads mean an important danger of buckling for empty or only partially filled silos. To avoid this risk, the silo is provided with stiffeners, known as windrings. These rings are built in the silo when wind loads cannot be supported by both, shell and vertical stiffeners. There is not a standard procedure for windrings distribution in the body of silos, so to calculate critical buckling load (first step before determining the need of windrings) simplified theories are usually used, such as the one supported on the critical buckling load for shells carrying external uniform pressure according to the formula of Von Mises. Taking into account these previous works, in this paper a general and simple method to determine whether windrings are necessary, their number and their more effective distribution in the body of the silo is presented, without more extensive numerical calculations.