Study on the Calculation Method of Effective Mass of Column-Supported Silo under Earthquake Action

Under earthquake action, the storage material has the shock absorption and energy consumption effect on the silo due to the friction of the particles-particles and the interaction of grains–silo wall. In order to quantify the magnitude of this energy dissipating effect, a method for calculating the effective mass coefficient of column-supported silos under earthquake action has been proposed. In this paper, based on the experimental analysis, the effective mass calculation formula is derived by using the quasi-static equilibrium equation for the storage unit (micrometric layer). In addition, shaking table tests were conducted to verify the validity of the method. The results show that the proposed method can be used to assess the effective mass of stored materials under earthquakes. The effective mass coefficient increases with the peak acceleration and shows an almost non-linear increasing trend with the silo height. The results obtained from the proposed method and experiments in this paper are significantly less than the 0.8 specified by Eurocode 8. Finally, the values range of effective mass coefficient from in the case of three particle filling heights are determined to facilitate engineering applications, including 0.64 – 0.77 for full particles, 0.51 – 0.78 for three-quarter particles, and 0.56 – 0.77 for half particles.