Development of an expression for the volume of off-centered conical pile inside a cylindrical silo

In this study, both analytical and empirical formula that expresses volume of off-centered conical pile inside a cylindrical structure are proposed. The total of 1050 off-centered cones including three parameters of dimension are acquired by computer aided design software. A volume expression enclosing conical pile parameters associated with variables of optimization is derived. Then the volume expression is obtained by substituting the variables determined by particle swarm optimization algorithm. The mean absolute percentage error between calculated and designed volumes of 1050 data are found as 0.0017% and 0.0299% for analytical and empirical expressions, respectively. Proposed calculations are also compared with another empirical formula existing in literature. In addition, two different small-scale case study are performed and the proposed formulations are verified experimentally. Results demonstrate that volume of the off-centered conical pile inside a cylindrical structure can be easily calculated with the help of empirically developed expression, without using complex mathematics. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.