Cooling towers with arbitrary imperfections

An approach based on nonlinear theory of shells is proposed to analyze stresses of cooling towers with arbitrary imperfections. And an actual tower with non- axisymmetric imperfections and being subjected to wind pressure and dead weight is computed by the approach. The results show that the initial imperfections of the tower influence not only on meridional and circumferential resultant, but also on bending moments. Having compared our results with that by axisymmetric method, we found that both stress distributions cure considerably different. According to the latter the tower should have collapsed under strong wind condition, in fact, the tower is still right. It is demonstrated that the approach given by us is more reasonable in considering the tower with arbitrary imperfections.