204

R. Greiner and W. Guggenberger

provide a design formula, given originally by the API-Standard, which species the required section modulus of the ring for in-plane bending by Z = 0.058 106 D 2 L (4)

Another formula was developed by Blackler (1986) and Ansourian (1992), which results from the requirement of minimum stiffness under uniform external pressure on the basis of classical buckling eigenvalue analyses, but was recommended also for wind buckling by these authors:
IR = 0.048t 3 L

(5)

This formula is based on the assumption of clamped boundary of the shell at the bottom edge, which is in a rigorous sense usually not the case with practical tanks. The resulting ring section of this formula is very much smaller than that due to Eq. (4). However, this comparison does not allow clear conclusions, since for the API formula the technical background cannot reliably be identied since the magnitude and distribution of the wind pressure and the boundary conditions at the bottom end are not explicitly dened. More advanced recent studies Further studies both experimentally and numerically were carried out by Schmidt et al. (1998a,b), which made clear that the design of the primary wind girder is closely connected with the underlying concept of the shell design. The authors distinguish between design strategy 1, where the shell is designed in the usual way according to Eurocode 3, part 1.6 (1999) or DIN 18800, part 4 (1990), and design strategy 2, which makes use of the higher postcritical buckling resistance of very thin-walled shells in the elastic range. In the second case, the upper end-rings are of essential importance providing the statically necessary upper boundary of the locally buckled shell. In the rst case, the upper end-ring may be regarded as stiffening ring just raising the buckling resistance onto the required level of safety. If very thin walled cylindrical shells are designed to carry in the postcritical range (strategy 2), sufciently strong upper end-rings are necessary to take over the wind load of approximately the upper half portion of the cylindrical shell wall in the deformed buckled conguration. To this end, edge-rings according to Eq. (4) were found sufcient in case of simply supported lower edges (with no axial restraint). For axially xed lower edges, such rings are of course somewhat on the conservative side, because the boundary condition now provides a higher buckling resistance of the shell. If the cylindrical shell with axially xed lower edges is designed in accordance with strategy 1 thus leading to higher wall thickness than in the previous case upper end-rings according to the bifurcation-optimized minimum stiffness