Minimum weight design of conical concrete water tanks

Abstract

The minimum weight design of circular conical concrete water tanks is studied in this paper. The internal base radius, the depth and the semi-vertical angle of the cone are fixed while the thickness of the wall along the length is varied so that the bending (tensile) and hoop stresses attain values as close as possible to their respective allowable values. Only piecewise linear variations of wall thickness are considered. For the analysis the finite element method is used. This procedure is embedded into a minimization routine to deal with design problems. Results of some examples are presented and discussed. © 1988.