Pre-diseño de tanques elevados de acero para almacenamiento de agua con soporte estructural, para capacidades de 25.000 a 500.000 galones, mediante una hoja electrónica y validación en software SAP2000.

Abstract

This work was born out of the need to find a tool to facilitate and streamline the process of pre-sizing of elevated steel tanks, as a solution to this need a spreadsheet was developed that allows the preliminary design of elevated steel tanks with structural support of multiple columns for water storage with capacities between 25.000 and 500.000 gallons. The spreadsheet, in the first instance, determines the general geometry of the elevated tank: the diameter of the steel tank is determined according to the tables provided by AWWA D100-05, the dimensions of the skullcaps according to the recommendations of the ASME Section VIII Div. 1 and API 620-12. The thicknesses of the steel plates that make up the cylindrical and bottom part of the tank are determined according to the procedure of API 620, while the thickness required for the roof is determined according to the API 650 standard and was also taken into consideration the limitations that the AWWA D100 standard gives us in the thicknesses of steel plates. The loads: live load and wind load are applied according to AWWA D100-05 and ASCE-7 standards while the seismic load is applied according to the NEC-SE-DS standard. For the structural analysis, the spreadsheet determines the capacity of each structural element according to the AISC 360-10 standard and proposes the demand load by means of an algorithm, with this the Demand / Capacity relation is determined with which the user can choose the more suitable sections. Additionally, another application that allows to automatically modeling, in SolidWorks, the elevated tanks designed in the spreadsheet was developed. The validation of the spreadsheet was made by comparing its results with those issued by the SAP2000 software, obtaining very similar results, giving error percentages less than 10%, which concluded that the spreadsheet is totally reliable but it is recommended do not consider the results issued by the spreadsheet as a final design.