IDA-based definition of damage states for rc silo subjected to seismic excitations

Extensive damages or collapse observed for silos subjected to earthquake excitations can lead to significant monetary and environmental losses while human life may also be set at high risk. Therefore, the design of earthquake-resistant silos is essential to safeguard silos’ integrity and functionality over their lifetime. In case of adopting the performance-based design approach, well-defined damage limit states are required to quantify the expected seismic failures of silos. Nevertheless, to the authors’ best knowledge, only marginal research effort has been already spent to quantify appropriate damage limit states for silos. To this end, the current study is dedicated to determine damage states for a typical cylindrical reinforced concrete silo, containing granular material with the use of a multi-record, non-linear incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). The numerical model of the silo was developed in ABAQUS. The advanced hypoplastic constitutive model, extended with the intergranular strain approach, was adopted to simulate the dynamic performance of the granular material while the silo wall was modelled by using the concrete damaged plasticity model. Additionally, granular material-structure interaction was considered through a Coulomb friction interface. Both static and dynamic (i.e., time history) analyses were performed to validate both the granular material-structure interaction and the silo’s dynamic response. Furthermore, IDA curves, in terms of base shear over top displacement, were calculated with the use of an appropriately selected and scaled set of earthquake strong ground motions. The IDA curves were eventually used to quantify five damage limit states according to maximum top displacement criterion.