earthquake engineering

Abstract

Past earthquakes have demonstrated that industrial facilities such as petrochemical refineries can become largely damaged from the effects of strong ground motions. While much information on seismic assessment is related to conventional buildings, a lack of information is apparent with respect to most industrial infrastructure. As a matter of fact, most of the structures found in such facilities are complex by the nature of the operating process. This study evaluates the seismic performance of a modern piperack, which is representative of a typical typology present in refineries. A numerical 3D model built in the OpenSees platform is used to examine the response of the steel structure and the piping system attached to the mechanical equipment. The analysis method selected is incremental dynamic analysis (IDA), which involves multiple nonlinear time history analysis under a suite of ground motion records. The resultant set of IDA curves are in turn used to generate analytical fragility functions for the piping system in order to quantify the seismic risk of product leakage. It is envisioned that such tools can constitute a valid element for risk reduction decision making.