ABSTRACT
The paper deals with buckling of cylindrical silos composed of corrugated sheets and vertical stiffeners (columns). Comprehensive finite element analyses were carried out for a perfect silo by means of a linear buckling approach. Corrugated walls were simulated as an equivalent orthotropic shell and vertical thin-walled columns as beam elements. Calculations for perfect silos with different numbers of columns made it possible to establish three different ranges of the silo buckling performance. Based on results of three dimensional calculations, an original simplified segment silo wall model was proposed for calculations of silo global buckling for sparsely distributed columns. The calculated buckling loads were compared with an allowable one given by EN 1993-4-1. In addition geometrically non-linear analyses for both imperfect and perfect silos were carried out.
