NONLINEAR ANALYSIS OF ABOVEGROUND ANCHORED STEEL TANKS USING ENDURANCE TIME METHOD

Aboveground steel tanks are widely utilized in residential and industrial areas, and assurance of their seismic safety is a very important engineering consideration. In this paper, nonlinear response of these tanks using a new dynamic pushover procedure called Endurance Time (ET) method along with conventional nonlinear response history (RHA) is studied. The comparison between the results of RHA and ET method shows reasonable consistency. Based on the level of accuracy observed in this research, it is concluded that ET method can effectively be used in predicting seismic performance of anchored tanks. By considerably reducing the number of required response history analyses for estimating the response at various excitation levels, ET method has a good potential in paving the way for practical application of response history based analysis and design procedures for thin walled structures such as steel tanks.