94 W. Guggenberger et al.

for R/t = 500, since their purpose is explanatory. A shell thickness of t = 10 mm was used throughout. Idealisations of boundary, support and loading conditions In practical silo structures, a conical hopper is often used for discharge of the solids, and it meets the cylinder at the transition, where a ring may be provided at the junction (Fig. 3.1). All the different types of transition shown in Fig. 3.1 apply a stiff radial and circumferential restraint to the cylinder. The analysis of an isolated cylinder with a completely rigid radial restraint at each end thus provides a satisfactory representation of most practical structures. The radial and circumferential displacements at both the lower and upper circumferential edges were, therefore, xed, but the axial displacement component and the meridional rotations were free to move (i.e. classical hinged boundary conditions at the boundaries). It may be noted that the interaction effects with neighbouring structural components has not been considered here. The support was treated as axially exible: the applied support force induces a uniform axial stress across the width of the support, with the support providing no axial warping restraint and no meridional rotational restraint (Fig. 3.3(a)). This is a conservative assumption, leading to lower strengths than are achieved in practical supports. Other studies (e.g. She and Rotter 1993; Guggenberger and Greiner 1994a) have found the same structural behaviour when rigid supports (Fig. 3.3(b)) are used. The axial stress state in the cylindrical shell vary somewhat according to the geometry and loading applied to it: the dominant forces may arise from pressure on the closure, from wall friction due to stored granular solids or from more uniform loads applied at a distant boundary. Whatever the global loading case, the local stress regime close to the support is similar, and since the buckling behaviour is found to be quite local, the details of the loading which induces the high forces above the supports is not important unless the shell-height-to-diameter ratio is relatively small. Here, the axial loads are applied uniformly at the upper circumference (Figs 3.4 and 3.6). This corresponds to a reference uniform axial stress of 3.820 MPa (=1200 kN applied to the complete circumference) at the top of the shell. For comparison purposes it may be noted that this reference stress is equivalent to a mean axial membrane stress of 1.53% of the classical elastic critical stress cl (Timoshenko and Gere 1961; Yamaki 1984), which is given by cl = E 3(1 2 ) t t 0.605 E R R (1)

If the effect of internal pressure is additionally considered (The effect of internal pressure), this may be done in a simplied way (Fig. 3.6(a)). The real pressure distribution that is exerted by the contents is quite complicated (Ooi et al. 1990;