Buckling of aboveground oil storage tanks under internal pressure

Overpressurization can occur due to the ignition of flammable vapors existing inside aboveground oil storage tanks. Such accidents could happen more frequently than other types of accident. In the tank design, when the internal pressure increases, the sidewall-to-roof joint is expected to fail before failure occurs in the sidewall-to-bottom joint. This design concept is the socalled "frangible roof joint" introduced in API Standard 650. The major failure mode is bifurcation buckling in this case. This paper presents the bifurcation buckling pressures in both joints under internal pressure. Elastic and elastic-plastic axisymmetric shell finite element analysis was performed involving large deformation in the prebuckling state. Results show that API Standard 650 does not evaluate the frangible roof joint design conservatively in small diameter tanks.