Review on “KISSING SILOS”

Tower Silos were used to store forage crops for feeding cattle or Agricultural products by the
farmers. Earlier days Farmers used to construct small silos to store their agricultural products. With
increse in demand and production, they need large storage areas which happened to be Tower silos.

As per the requirement a farmer built two grain silos on lake Agassiz clay in the red river valley
of Winnipeg, manitoba, Canada with considerably less spacing between them . These Silos have
ring Foundation . When two or more silos are constructed very closely, the pressure bulbs overlap
which resluts in failure of the structure. It resultes in tilting of the silos away from their actual
positions which we happened to see in this case. The ultimate bearing capacity of two interfering
footing increse with decrease in spacing between the footing and attains a peak magnitude at some
spacing named as critical spacing. Again if the spacing between the footings is less than critical
spacing also reduces the bearing capacity. Due to interference of pressure bulb of two footings, the
stress isobars overlap to form a single isobar of large dimension, which alters the characterstic
behaviour of an isolated footing. The interfence effect increases the load from the Super structure
that exceeds the bearing capacity of structure which causes failure.

Another reason which can be mentioned for the tilting of silos was the foundations of both silos
were considered as isolated footing without considering the interference effect of the adjacent
footing. There are few measures to counter such failures like Proper reinforcing of the footings.
Cobined Footing also can hold the silos intact without any failure. An adequate factor of safety is
needed to be taken to prevent th ebearing capacity failures, excessive settlements or tilting.

Thus the altering of the bearing capacity of foundation soil due to interference effect resulted in
tilting of the adjacent tower silos towards each other, which ended up as “KISSING” silos