Evaluation of Steel Tanks Due to Hurricanes

Tanks are vital infrastructure in the Caribbean islands. They allow the storage of different elements, mainly water, oil, and petrochemical products. The instability of liquid storage tanks under considerable wind loads is of interest in many parts of the world. Specially in areas which have seasonal winds and hurricanes. Evaluation of these structures is necessary to analyze critical loads that cause failure of tank shells. There are several previous works regarding similar studies, but they only include analyses of tanks without roof. In this work we are modeling a steel tank with a cone roof subjected to wind loads. The observation of damaged tanks provides a good idea of the mode shape. These shapes help us to find a critical load, which causes a similar mode shape. In order to obtain such shape, we applied different distributions of pressure on the roof and compare the results