Accumulated material, workmanship and design errors in the unstable, prefabricated reinforced concrete cylindrical tank

Abstract

Abstract There are complex reasons for the failure of prefabricated reinforced concrete material. Those are errors related to putting the concrete structure up, insufficient supervision of material checkup during construction works, design errors, inappropriate usage of other building materials, and in particular mistakes made while linking material elements that do not allow for the complete connection of all individual parts into one monolithic as a whole block. In the case of the biological gas tanks presented in the submitted paper, the following methods applied for measuring the width of prefabricated concrete slabs joints did not prevent the contractor from committing major errors in material resulting in significant imperfections of the tank walls. As a result, the presented tank, which maintains stability for smaller diameters; for large diameters becomes a buckling-sensitive structure. Poorly made joints become places of the buckling wave initiation and drastically reduce critical force. Repeated failures of the same tank with constantly increasing discipline of the facility construction has confirmed low resistance of the tank to the second-order effects, which is strictly related to the usage of the bad material, characterized in detail in the research paper.