The seismic risk assessment of industrial facilities mainly relies on historical data and the analysis and design of uncoupled secondary components. Accordingly, the dynamic interaction between primary structures and process equipment is overlooked. The SPIF project -Seismic Performance of Multi-Component Systems in Special Risk Industrial Facilities -was carried out to respond to this gap, within the European H2020 SERA framework. Its objective regarded the investigation of the seismic behaviour of an archetype industrial multi-storey steel moment resisting frame (MRF) structure equipped with non-structural components (NSCs) by means of shaking table tests. The goal of the proposed study was to extend the interaction analysis between a primary multi-storey braced frame (BF) steel structure and NSCs in a performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) perspective. Along this vein, to excite the vibration periods of the NSCs and thus enhance possible coupling with the primary structure, a synthetic site-based ground motion model (GMM) was employed. More precisely, the proposed research intended: (i) to severely excite the process equipment and supplement the scarcity of real records with a specific frequency content by means of a stochastic GMM; (ii) to quantify seismic-induced force and displacement demands of secondary components and their effects on the primary BF structure.The evaluation of the experimental data clearly shows buckling in the bracing system of the BF configuration and a strong interaction between vertical tanks and floor crossbeams of the BF. At the very least, the favourable performance of the archetype BF under strong seismic records is demonstrated.
Seismic risk assessment of new and existing structures has a long history, which is based on the development of specific methods for seismic hazard and vulnerability analyses. Performance‐based earthquake engineering is the natural evolution and integration of all these aspects that is nowadays implemented in several precodes. However, some critical aspects are not yet completely clarified. As a matter of fact, the vulnerability analysis suffers the so‐called record‐to‐record variability, which is usually controlled through different parameters used as seismic intensity measures (IMs), whose significance is still under discussion. Moreover, this variability represents an additional source of uncertainty, which is added to the dispersion derived from the ground motion prediction equation (GMPE), leading to an overconservatism. For these reasons, the present paper aims to propose a novel framework for the seismic risk assessment of structures, which is found on the idea to control the response variability in evaluating seismic hazard curves without taking into account the randomness (ε) of the GMPE, which instead is transferred to fragility curves. These latter are built by using groups of accelerograms, whose median and 84% fractile spectra fit well, for different return periods, the uniform hazard spectra for ε= 0 and 1, respectively. For this purpose, a new search algorithm for selecting natural records is formulated. The proposed method offers considerable advantages as it is no longer necessary to refer to a specific IM, and allows to select pairs of spectrum‐compatible natural records, which is enable to solve the problem of the seismic assessment of three‐dimensional structures. The procedure is then applied to assess seismic risk of a typical reinforced concrete frame, whose results demonstrate the robustness of the method and the practical independence from the record set used.
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