Liquid-filled storage tanks under earthquake excitation are loaded by hydrodynamic pressure due to the interactive motion with the containing fluid. The dynamic response and the buckling of these tanks have been studied by many authors both experimentically and theoretically, but a unified design procedure is still lacking. For a better understanding of the failure mechanism and the load varrying behavior of anchored tanks a quasistatic finite element procedure is carried out employing the response spectrum method. The numerical model is discretisized by mixed ring shell elements taking geometric and physical nonlinearities into account. Different superposition of the pressure eigenforms due to the horizontal and the vertical earthquake component leads to different behavior of the tank-fluid-system. The results obtained are compared with classical values and with simplified design procedures provided in Eurocode 8, Part 4.

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