An assessment of the role of geometric imperfections in the collapse of the fiddlers ferry cooling tower

The B2 cooling tower at Fiddlers Ferry Power Station collapsed during a gale in January 1984. It was known that this tower contained a roughly axisymmetric bulge just above the ring beam which had been present since the time of construction. This paper describes various finite element analysis that were carried out to assess the effect of this geometrical imperfection on the stresses in the tower. It is shown that the bulge would have caused vertical cracks to develop and the subsequent propagation of both horizontal and vertical cracks would have ultimately lead to the collapse of the tower.