Computer-aided design package RCTANK for the analysis and design of reinforced concrete tanks

The design of reinforced concrete liquid retaining structures involves many tedious calculations and/or numerous design charts. Frequently some careless human errors, which are fatal to the design, may be introduced in calculations or in interpolations of design charts. In view of this a computer-aided design package would appear to be necessary. This paper presents the development and verification of a computer program RCTANK for computer-aided design of medium-sized liquid retaining tanks. It is a structural engineering problem capable of performing analysis of the wall, the roof slab and the base slab of the tank, and, according to the analysis results, also giving recommendations about suitable concrete thicknesses and reinforcements entailed for different structural elements. Two most commonly encountered shapes, namely, rectangular and circular configurations, for liquid retaining tanks are catered for. These different shapes, together with the two different tank locations, i.e. locating at roof or below ground surface, constitute four different combinations to be considered in the computer program. Due to the numerous advantages provided by Turbo Pascal version 5.0, it is adopted as the programming language.