Strength of welded steel silo hoppers under filling and flow pressures

A typical elevated silo consists of a cylinder and a discharge hopper. The hopper in a silo supports the majority of the material stored within the silo, and is subject to biaxial tension. This paper presents the first known study of the collapse behavior of welded steel silo hoppers under the bulk-solid pressure distributions given by the theory developed by Walker in 1966. The aims of this paper are to identify the possible failure modes, to examine the effect of different pressure distributions on the collapse strengths of welded hoppers and transition junctions, and to discuss current criteria for the design of welded-steel hoppers. The two most important messages from this study are: (1) For most practical weldedsteel silo hoppers, the failure strength of the hopper is independent of the pressure distribution in the hopper; and (2) where the actual pressure distribution does matter, the filling pressures are more critical than the flow pressures