Performance of Steel Grain Silos and Rural Communities to Windstorms

Rural communities are home to millions of people and small businesses, and are found in a wide range of geographic locations across the United States. As such, these rural areas are routinely subjected to extreme loads and natural hazards including earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. It is an enormous challenge to quantify the scale and extent of natural hazards’ damage on rural communities, particularly when considering the various components such as destroyed feed supplies, livestock losses, damage to barns and other structures, etc. This challenge is exacerbated by the lack of knowledge regarding the response of many rural systems to weather and climate disasters. Therefore, as a first step towards understanding the impacts of natural hazards on rural communities, this paper first presents the results of a digital/virtual reconnaissance of rural communities that have been subjected to a natural hazard during the first seven months of 2018. The results of this digital reconnaissance, in combination with traditional reconnaissance, highlighted that large steel grain silo structure is particularly susceptible to windstorms. To gain further insight into this problem, a numerical model of this structure in LS-DYNA is presented and used within a parametric study to identify the key geometric and load properties that lead to failure of the structure.