Granby Composites fiberglass tanks
Granby Composites is a manufacturer of fiberglass tanks with more than 20 years of experience in producing this type of product used for various functions such as potable water management, wastewater or fire protection. The tanks are custom-made according to the project requirements, they can be buried underground or installed aboveground. The quotes from Granby Composites’ customers regularly require validation by an engineer and meeting certain standards for this type of product.
The mandate of Lx Sim was to evaluate the resistance of the tank to meet the safety factors and the requirements of the standards CAN/ULC S615-14; ANSI/AWWA D120-09, CSA-B66-10, HS-20 as well as the criteria applicable to aboveground tanks of Canadian (National Building Code) and American (ASCE 7-22) civil engineering codes. The load cases studied are, among others, earth pressure, water pressure, snow, wind and live loads. The main structure of the tank is made of composite materials in the form of sprayed, mat and woven glass fibers.
Results:
The finite element analyses performed by Lx Sim allowed the customer to refine the concepts in some regions to meet the desired safety factors and to validate that their product met the requirements of the standards. The analyses covered components such as partitions, manholes, pipes, walkways and lifting lugs.
Granby Composites' tanks being customizable and can take multiple configurations, the methodology adopted sought to identify the most severe configurations to determine an analysis framework which covers a range of possible configurations. This methodology allows to approve the design plans faster as per engineering quotes from Granby Composites’ customers.
