ANNOUNCEMENT

Left-to-right: Professor J. M. Rotter, Dr Jin Ooi and Professor A. Jennings at the award
ceremony at the University of Edinburgh

Munro Prize for Engineering

Structures 1990

Butterworth-Heinemann wish to congratulate the Department of Civil

Engineering at Edinburgh University,
which recently won a major international
prize in recognition of its quality research
work in the field of loading on silo structures. TNO research workers at Edinburgh, Professor Michael Rotter and Dr
Jin Ooi, undertook this study cooperatively
with Dr Lain Pham of the Australian
CSIRO in Melbourne. The research paper,
entitled 'Systematic and random features
of measured pressures on silo walls',
arose from an extended series of international collaborative efforts.
A huge number of structural failures
occur in silos every year in all parts of the
world, causing serious economic loss in
many industries: chemical, mining, agriculture, steel making, shipping and food
processing. Serious failures in grain silos
in Sweden in the 1970s led to a large Scandinavian programme of research in the
1970s and 1980s, which ultimately led to
the present study. In the Scandinavian programme, Danish researchers Professor
Vagn Askegaard and Dr Jorgen Nielsen

350

instrumented a 46 m high concrete grain

silo with many pressure cells, and
observed several high pressure events during the filling and discharge procedure.
The information gained led to great
changes in our understanding of the
requirements for silo design. However,
their experimental results remained difficult to understand and hard to implement
in practice. One problem was the enormous mass of data, amounting in total to
over 1,000,000 observations.
This set of experiments remains unique
in the world: no comparable structure has
ever been so thoroughly instrumented and
tested. In 1988, Dr Nielsen of the Danish
Building Research Establishment generously sent the full set of original observations to Professor Rotter, who was then
based at the University of Sydney in
Australia. He was working cooperatively
with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO) to develop new statistical techniques tor interpreting pressure measurements in metastable
environments.
Professor Rotter and Dr Lam Pham of the
CSIRO applied for a Collaborative
Research Grant from the University of
Sydney and CSIRO, and this was used to
fund the statistical analysis of this massive
set of experimental results.

Eng. Struct. 1 9 9 2 , Vol. 14, No 5

Dr Jin Ooi undertook the principal work

on the project. When established statistical
methods proved inadequate for the task, it
was he who wrote new software and
developed new interpretive techniques to
extract a reliable understanding from the
data set. The initial findings of this
research were reported in the Engineering
Structures paper which has received the
present award. Before submission to
Engineering Structures, the paper was
reviewed by Dr Nielsen, Dr Max Blackler
of Mott MacDonald in Croydon, UK, and
Mr John Sadler, of Columbus, Ohio,
Chairman of the American Concrete
Institute Committee on silo design. The
work has been much discussed at international conferences on material handling,
and standards for the design of silos in
Europe, North America and elsewhere are
likely to be significantly altered in the light
of these new understandings.
The work can thus be seen as a culmination of cooperative efforts in Sweden,
Denmark, Australia, USA and Britain,
between universities, building research
establishments, industry and government
research organizations. The work is
applicable to the design of industrial thin
shell structures, so it is a happy coincidence that it should be in the field in
which John Munro himself excelled.