Investigation of seismic behavior of reinforced concrete cylindrical silos considering bulk material- structure- soil interaction

The silos which is a special structural system interacting with both bulk material and soil/foundation system have a notably complex behaviour, opposed to many other structural systems. The lack of studies about seismic behavior of silos and the effects of above mentioned interactions on the seismic responses of silos is an important gap in the technical literature. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the approaches used for the seismic design of silos in technical literature, to investigate the seismic response of the silos by developing models which are taking into these interactions and to present how these interactions can be considered practically. This study, carried out for this purpose, consists of four main chapters and one appendix. General information related to silos is given in Chapter 1. Developed basic approaches for bulk material-structure and soil-structure interaction problems are introduced in Chapter 2 and applicability of these approaches to silos are evaluating according to several parameters in Chapter 3. Conclusions and recommendations for future studies are presented in Chapter 4. This chapter is followed by the list of references, an appendix and the author?s biography. Finally, in this study, effects of bulk material and soil interaction on the seismic behavior of silos according to several parameters were determined; it was shown that some analytical methods developed for the interaction problems can produce similar results with numerical methods.