Corrugated Steel Grain Bin Design 3

[SMAJ]

I've been searching for a reference for the design of corrugated steel bin design and cannot find anything other than a paper written in 1909. Lots for straight wall bins; lots of vendor adds and links to erection manuals; surely there is a widely accepted basis for the design of corrugated steel bins.

 

[jimstructures]

Contact Al Harrald or Dave Evans at the Butler Manufacturing Company, Research Center (in Kansas City, MO.) and ask them if the have any sources for calculating circular bin capacity.

Jim

 

[human909]

I'm not sure about widely accepted but I've seen corrugated silo calculation from a large manufacturer and their approach was simply hoop tensile strength calculations (EURO CODE). The bolt line becomes the critical point in this design. Vertical loads are assumed to be all supported by the vertical members running across the corrugations.

 

[robyengIT]

EUROCODE : on the header of the attached file you'll find the ref to the standard number (mainly EN 1993 part 4-1)

 

[DBronson]

SMAJ:

Have you consulted the ASABE Link web site? They have several publications listed on grain bin design some of which are ANSI standards.

Regards,

DB

 

[r13]

Excellent paper provided by robyeng.

 

[CrabbyT]

I worked for one of the larger companies in the US that designs and fabricates grain bins. I primarily designed support structures for the grain bins, and I never had a hand in the design of any of the bins, but right before I was hired, my boss had designed a new series of bins that hold over a million bushels.

As I recall, his design strategy involved creating a preliminary model in RISA 3D. Then, they created a very detailed model in ANSYS and rented a supercomputer to run the analysis. And finally, they built a full-scale model and tested it. I remember him explaining that there's not a lot of documentation or guidance for designing grain bins, and that a lot of bin design principles are based on tribal knowledge and the basis of "if it works, it works."

Section 6.5 of Blodgett's "Design of Welded Structures" has some info on tanks, bins, and hoppers, but it only covers straight-walled containers.

I suspect that corrugated bins are susceptible to some of the same challenges as what can be encountered when trying to quantify the strength contribution of a corrugated wall panel (e.g. to what extent can corrugated siding serve as a diaphragm?). With bins, it might be tougher to quantify mathematically given that they're more or less a sort-of pressure vessel made out of siding and cold formed steel. If you got heavy into mathematical analysis, I imagine there would be a lot out-of-plane-this and local-deformation-that things to consider.

 

[Brad805]

The book below (not sure where you would find), is one of the most complete references I have found. As for code standards, the only complete codified book is the EU model cited. Personally, unless you are working for a manufacturer I would stay out of this. I have been involved in failure analysis of these and when I spoke to the experts on this they mentioned how much time they spend in failure litigation.

https://jenike.com/structural-mechanical-engineering/

https://www.civilax.com/guide-for-the-economic-design-of-circular-metal-silos/

 

[jimstructures]

The link posted by DBronson to the ASABE web site is spot on for US designs. I did one search for corrugated bin design and I came up with a list of 6 publications for design of corrugated bin design for $ 10 each member price and $ 25 each non member price.

Jim

 

[human909]

As I recall, his design strategy involved creating a preliminary model in RISA 3D. Then, they created a very detailed model in ANSYS and rented a supercomputer to run the analysis. And finally, they built a full-scale model and tested it. I remember him explaining that there's not a lot of documentation or guidance for designing grain bins, and that a lot of bin design principles are based on tribal knowledge and the basis of "if it works, it works."

It is a little scary and little bit of a fast and loose approach but this is what I've seen. I've worked with a company that did routinely designed bins and hoppers often with no engineering, that works at small scale but when you start getting into big stuff you REALLY need to do it properly. I've seen more bins than I would like that are under-designed, more than a few failures or failing.

I've designed a few bins myself. Eurocode is the the best loading code. Watch your connections and cover your ass.

This was a few months ago in Algeria:

Wind damage. Winds were high but apparently measured at levels below design spec.

 

[BAretired]

This may be of some help:

http://www1.aggrowth.com/_uploads/documents/manuals/ENM-18911.pdf

It includes several pages of specifications like this:

Here is another interesting article (and a bit scary in spots). It looks like wind stability is one of the main concerns when designing this type of bin.

https://www.namic.org/pdf/13events/presentations/AG_SteelCorrugatedGrainBins.pdf.

BA