Boston steel tank

Dorr, of the law firm Hale and Dorr, was the named plaintiff who had his house damaged from the tank failure.

The case was, without doubt, an expensive one. The many experts included several from MIT and Harvard, split about evenly between sides. Organizations carried out large-scale tank explosion tests and wide panel fracture tests that included a replica manhole from which nearly everyone agreed the fracture initiated.

An excellent account of the general circumstances surrounding the accident, with particular attention to the historical and social aspects at the time — anarchists were blamed by some for setting off an explosion in the tank — is given by Stephen Puleo Analysis of the accident scene began immediately after the failure.

Figure 2 is a photograph taken at the disaster site. Figure 3 is a schematic of the structures that were adjacent to the tank, as well as the approximate initial locations of some of those killed when the tank burst.

The tank had been filled 29 times, but only four times to near maximum capacity. The last fill to near capacity occurred two days prior to the failure. A 6-ton piece of the tank that included part of the manhole was found the furthest from the tank, about feet, in the playground in the right foreground of Figure 1. Its distant location was considered a key piece of evidence that an explosion had occurred.

The tank was designed to contain 2. The riveted construction was 90 feet in diameter, 50 feet tall, made of open hearth steel varying in thickness from 0. The vertical joints between the pieces in the first course were made with double butt joints with a triple row of rivets on each side of the joint in a diamond pattern Figure 4.

The vertical joints in the remaining rings were made by lap joints using triple rivets in rings 2 and 3 and double rivets in rings 4 through 7. All horizontal joints were connected by lap joints with a single row of rivets. The connection between the bottom of ring 1 and the bottom of the tank was made through a 4-inch by 4-inch by 0. The rivet holes were evidently punched and not subsequently reamed, likely to save time. Riveted construction was the primary method of making connections at that time and, although there were apparently no tank design standards in that era, engineering textbooks described methods to design such joints c.

Benjamin and Hoffman, ; and Merriman, These books gave guidance on design stresses for the rivets and plates they joined. A factor of safety of four on ultimate strength was recommended for relatively static load applications such as buildings, and Merriman suggested a factor of four for steel see Table 1. In testimony, reference is made to the Boston Building Law, which in the provisions included the following limits on stress for steel:.

The law included a note that the ultimate strength of steel must be ksi, that the yield strength elastic limit must be at least one-half the ultimate strength, and that the percent elongation in 8 inches must be at least 1. For an ultimate strength of 55 ksi, this equates to a minimum elongation of All of the steel used to fabricate the tank satisfied these values. The practice of the time for the design of riveted joints was to check for three failure modes: tensile failure through a row of holes; shear failure of rivets; and bearing failure between the rivets and their holes.

Applying the design methodology from Benjamin and Hoffman to the joint configuration of Figure 4 gives the calculated stresses shown in Table 2. The allowable stresses were exceeded. The In addition, the lap joint made in the manhole neck flange at the tank plate was at the top of the manhole Figure 5. The latter was used by many defense witnesses as a key piece of evidence to support an explosion as the cause of failure. Most structural steel production in was by the open hearth process.

The material exhibited very good strength with high ductility. At that time, toughness was not specified in material procurements. The chemistry for the steel in the plate containing the manhole is shown in Table 3, compared with the chemistries of two modern steels. Note the particularly low value of manganese in the steel used to construct the molasses tank.

Chemistry, thermal processing, and quality of production all affect the fracture properties of steel. For the class of steels corresponding to the molasses tank, known as pearlitic steels, carbon has the greatest effect on the propensity for brittle behavior: the higher the carbon, the higher the temperature at which there is a transition the transition temperature from brittle to ductile behavior.

Manganese does not have as strong an effect as carbon, but, generally, the lower the manganese content, the higher the transition temperature. The amount of testimony in the molasses tank failure litigation related to Neumann bands is astounding.

Neumann bands are a feature first discovered in meteoric iron by Neumann. They are narrow bands, a few micrometers wide, usually within a grain, and are now known as deformation twins because they are created by mechanical deformation and have a mirror image crystal structure across twin boundaries. Expert after expert for the defense produced micrographs of Neumann bands in cross sections taken near the primary fracture.

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