An Innovative Roof Shape in Liquid Storage Tanks to Reduce Dynamic Sloshing Effects

In this study, a new type of tank roof form is suggested to reduce the high impact forces caused by sloshing. Using this roof allows the tank designers to consider less freeboard, which is economically valuable. For this purpose, an experimental investigation has been implemented to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed roof to distribute the contained liquid impact forces in several time stages. In these experimental measurements, a series of shaking table tests are conducted for a partially filled tank under harmonic and various earthquake excitations for both typical and proposed tank roof forms. The liquid impact forces are reasonably evaluated and compared for both types of tank roof. The efficacy of the proposed roof design is validated by experimental results and it is shown that the sloshing loads can significantly be reduced up to an average of 50% for the dimensions considered in the experiments.