Feasibility Study of Tank Failure Test With “E-Defense”

After the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention started to construct a large-scale 3-D shaking table, called “E-Defense”. The facility is to be completed in 2005, and failure experiments of many kinds of structures are to be performed. As for a feasibility study of those experiments, a plan of a full-scale tank failure test was investigated. A steel cylindrical tank of 990m3 capacity was selected as a typical liquid storage tank. The height is about 15m and the diameter is about 10m. The total mass, with full of water, is about 1 MN (1,000 tonf). The tank is constructed on a steel frame structure for specimen handling and test facility protection, and set on the shaking table. To prevent facility failure due to a mass of water leakage, waterproof walls are necessary at the lower part of the frame. Ground motion recorded at the Kobe earthquake is applied to the shaking table, and elephant foot bulge buckling is expected to occur at the bottom portion of the tank. Through this preliminary planning, technical feasibility of tank failure tests was confirmed, and problems to be solved for actual planning were clarified.Copyright © 2002 by ASME