Steel cylinders on local supports with rigid stiffeners

The main part of a traditional silo is the cylindrical shell placed upon a limited number of support columns in order to facilitate emptying operations. These local supports lead to stress concentrations in the cylinder and can cause local instabilities of the shell. In order to prevent this failure phenomenon, the cylindrical shell can be reinforced by means of two longitudinal stiffeners of limited length above each support in combination with a ring stiffener above and below the vertical stiffeners. In this paper, the longitudinal stiffeners are assumed to be flexurally and axially rigid in order to prevent the stiffeners from buckling and to allow the study of the structural behaviour of the cylinder. The results of an initial numerical study with the finite element package ABAQUS are presented