On the Fundamental Periods of Vibration of Flat-Bottom Ground-Supported Circular Silos containing Gran-like Material

Despite the significant amount of research effort devoted to understanding the structural behavior of grain-silos, each year a large number of silos still fails due to bad design, poor construction, with a frequency much larger than other civil structures. In particular, silos frequently fails during large earthquakes, as occurred during the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake when almost all the silos located in Taichung Port, 70 km far from the epicenter, collapsed. The EQE report stated that “the seismic design of practice that is used for the design and construction of such facilities clearly requires a major revision”. The fact indicates that actual design procedures have limits and therefore significant advancements in the knowledge of the structural behavior of silo structures are still necessary. The present work presents an analytical formulation for the assessment of the natural periods of grain silos. The predictions of the novel formulation are compared with experimental findings and numerical simulations.