Abstract:
Accurate dynamic parameters are essential to more reasonably design grain group silos under earthquake action. In this study, the vibration characteristics of large-scale grain silos were analyzed, considering 15 silos in three rows and five columns in a grain storage project. The specific procedure was as follows: 1) A feasible optimization scheme was proposed for the ambient vibration test of grain group silos using structural vibration and finite element method (FEM), together with the structural and load symmetry in the actual engineering condition. 2) The measuring points were drawn in the corner silo (No. 11) and the side silo (No. 12), and then the point elevation and orientation were all listed in the tables. The acceleration signals of measuring points were obtained after the test. The least square, five-point three-smoothing, and digital filtering were then used to efficiently process the measured data. 3) The mode shapes of grain group silos were derived using control theory and motion equation of vibration via the acceleration data and transformation matrix. The first four mode shapes and frequencies were calculated to draw for the corner silo (No. 11) and the side silo (No. 12). The results demonstrated that the mode shapes were all the same. In the first four mode frequencies, the calculated values were 2.28, 3.45, 6.37 and 8.26 Hz, respectively, and the simulated values were 2.35, 3.56, 6.31 and 8.16 Hz with an error of 3.07%, 3.19%, 0.94%, and 1.21%, respectively. In the vibration responses of the corner silo (No. 11) and the side silo (No. 12), the first mode shapes of the two silos were all along the short axis direction of the whole grain silos with the same shear deformation and the same amplitude, indicating that there was little effect of adjacent silos on the first vibration response. The second mode shapes of two silos were all along the long axis direction of whole grain silos with the same shear deformation but a different amplitude. The constraint effect among the corner silo (No. 11) and the adjacent silos was weaker than that of the side silo (No. 12) and the adjacent silos. Therefore, the vibration amplitude of the former was larger than that of the latter. The third mode shapes of two silos were torsion shapes around the center of grain group silos, while, the rotational amplitude of the measuring point in the short-axis direction was greater than that in the long-axis direction. The fourth mode shapes of the two silos were significantly different, due to different interactions among the corner silo (No. 11) and the adjacent silos and that of the side silo (No. 12) and the adjacent silos. Bending mode shapes of the measuring points of the corner silo (No. 11) near the side silo, and the amplitudes were relatively small, but the other points were mainly shear or flexural shear mode shapes, and the amplitudes were relatively larger. The reason was that three adjacent silos constrained the side silo (No. 12) to the small amplitudes. Bend-shear mode shapes were found in the measuring points near the adjacent silos, but the points of the middle column were mainly shear mode shapes. Each silo in the grain group silos represented different interactions with the adjacent silos at the measuring positions, indicating a significant impact on the second order and above modes. A seismic design of grain group silos can be expected to divide into several parts for better materials cost-saving, according to the shape and amplitude of vibration mode.