Bending and Membrane Equilibrium in Cooling Towers

Abstract

The complete linear bending equations for thin elastic shells are specialized to the case of single sheet hyperboloids that are subjected everywhere to the normal loading cos nθ, in which θ is the meridional angle. Solutions computed by finite difference methods for a typical cooling tower show: (1) that solutions in the main body of the shell are not sensitive to the forms of base support considered; (2) that the induced stresses have their largest values when n is 8 and thereafter decrease fairly rapidly with n; (3) that these stresses are predicted reliably by the membrane theory for n less than 4; and (4) that for loadings on model towers in wind tunnels, the results of membrane theory agree well with the complete bending solutions.