Minimum weight design of cylindrical water tanks

The paper deals with the minimum weight design of cylindrical water tanks. The design is to conform to BS5337. The design procedure used is a combination of the finite element analysis of structures and a numerical method of optimization. In the design, the internal radius and the height of the tank are fixed and the variation of wall thickness is treated as the unknown of the design. Only piecewise linear variations of thickness are considered. Results of some examples are presented and discussed.