Ramirez Olivar O. J., Zuluaga Mayorga S., Munoz Giraldo F., Sanchez-Silva M., Salzano E., 2018, The Effects of Extreme Winds on Industrial Equipment, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 67, 871-876.
Climatic variation is becoming increasingly relevant in the assessment of risk due to natural hazards, which may have severe impact on chemical and petrochemical industries. These kinds of accidents are now defined as Natech events (Natural Hazard Triggering Technological Accidents). Among the industrial equipment, atmospheric storage tanks are particularly vulnerable to weather phenomena and particularly to strong winds, hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes. The failure of the tank shell may indeed result in the release of large amount of hazardous substances rather than the pure structural damage of the shell. In this article, a review and an evaluation of hazard for extreme winds are presented. Hence the vulnerability of vertical storage tanks when subjected to extreme loads is evaluated by considering several failure states such as shell buckling and overturning. Debris hazard will be also evaluated.
