Estimation of Dynamic Properties of Steel Liquid Storage Tank by Shaking Table Test

Liquid storage tank is one of the major infrastructures and generally used to store gases, drinking and utilizing water, dangerous fluids, fire water and so on. According to the recent reports and experiences, the tank structures are damaged in many earthquakes due to their low energy dissipating capacity. Therefore, many researchers have been tried to know the dynamic properties of the tanks including liquids. However, vary limited experimental studies are carried out using relatively small tank models. In this study, a series of shaking table tests are performed with maximum 2 m cubic rectangular liquid storage tanks made of steel to measure the natural frequency and estimate damping coefficient of impulsive and convective mode of the tanks. Especially, the damping values under different shapes and excitation methods are estimated by logarithmic decrement method and half power band-pass method and compared with current design code and standards such as ASCE 7, Eurocode 8 and NZS. Test results show that the impulsive mode damping is around 2% which is proposed by general standards and codes but the impulsive mode damping is 0.13% average that is slightly lower than the code recommendation.