Dynamic response property of cooling tower structures

Reinforced concrete (R/C) cooling tower structures have been used for cooling down the hot water produced by power or chemical plants. These structures are designed to prevent against the failure under a self-weight and a wind loading, as well as an earthquake loading. In this paper, the numerical scheme under parallel processing is introduced and the dynamic evaluation of the cooling tower under an earthquake loading is examined. In numerical analyses, the cooling tower is assumed to have two types of conventional column system, i.e., V-column and I-column systems. Both R/C shell portion and column system are modeled by use of solid elements. From the numerical analyses, the higher stress concentrations are arisen between the junctions of R/C shell and columns for I-column than those for V-column. Also, it is concluded that the additional reinforcements should be placed around the junction considering the seismic effects.