Hi,
I have a 12 sided silo drawn in staad. I need to add a "roof" to it and tried using a plate but I can only create 3 and 4 sided plates. How do I create a 12 sided plate?
Also, I need to model this silo at various levels (50% full, 75%, 90%, etc.). Is there a simple way to "fill" the silo with a certain density of material or must I calculate the forces acting on each plate for each situation? This gets complicated as at the bottom of the silo is a cone to funnel the material onto a conveyor belt.
I am running STAAD.Pro CONNECT.
Thanks.
Hello,
If I understand your first question correctly. you are going to cover the silo with a single plate entity of 12 sides. Is it right? Will there be no meshing in that plate? Because, when you are dealing with FEM, meshing is an important part. Anyway, there is no way to create 12 sided plate. But you can easily create the cover using parametric modeling under Geometry. With this tool you can define the periphery of an area and it will be meshed accordingly. Try and see if this helps. But, it will again create meshed 3 or 4 sided plates.
You can create different load cases and apply plate pressure along with hydrostatic load to simulate the loading conditions.
But, when you are dealing with Silo design, you need to consider filling and emptying conditions and extra loads due to those operations. I don't think that is easy to represent in software. So, for those checks please use some manual calculations as per some standard literatures.