Buckling Characteristics of Floating Roof Pontoons in Aboveground Storage Tanks Subjected to Bending Load in Two Directions

The 2003 Tokachi-Oki earthquake caused severe damage to aboveground oil storage tanks due to liquid sloshing. Seven single-deck floating roofs had experienced structural problems as evidenced by sinking failure in large diameter tanks at the refinery in Tomakomai, Japan. The pontoons of the floating roofs might be buckled due to circumferential bending moment during the sloshing. The content in the tank was spilled on the floating roof from small failures which were caused at the welding joints of pontoon bottom plate by the buckling. Then the floating roof began to lose buoyancy and submerged into the content slowly. The authors had reported the buckling strength of the pontoons with and without ring stiffeners subjected to circumferential bending load in the previous papers. This paper presents the buckling strength of the pontoons subjected to both circumferential and radial bending load. The axisymmetric shell finite element method is used in the analysis. Linear elastic bifurcation buckling analysis is carried out and the buckling characteristics of the pontoon with and without ring stiffeners are investigated.