This paper proposes a dynamic elasto-plastic analysis method for cylindrical liquid storage tanks using the explicit finite element method and demonstrates that the proposed method can adequately analyze the seismic response (vibration response and sloshing) and buckling behavior of large-scale liquid storage tanks installed in nuclear power plants. In the proposed method, the tank structure was modeled three-dimensionally by shell elements allowing geometric nonlinearity to be considered, while the liquid contained in the tank was modeled by solid elements which comply with Euler's equation. In addition, fluid-structure coupling between the tank wall and the contained water was calculated by the ALE method and the dynamic elastic-plastic analysis was conducted by time-history analysis using the explicit time integration method. The proposed dynamic analysis method was validated with dynamic buckling experiments.
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