On the seismic fragility of pipe rack—piping systems considering soil–structure interaction

Abstract

Piping systems constitute the most vulnerable component in down-and mid-stream facilities posing immediate threat to human lives, communities financial robustness and environment. Pipe racks present several mechanical and geometrical idiosyncrasies compared to common buildings and the seismic response is governed by the pipework layout. Important design requirements e.g. dynamic interaction between pipelines and supporting structure are commonly overlooked during pipe racks design process and uncertainties relevant to modelling of soil or seismic input are not quantified. In the present work, after reviewing the technical literature and codes, a 3D RC rack was used as a testbed and analysed as coupled and decoupled with a non-seismic code conforming piping system accounting for soil-structure interaction. Incremental dynamic analysis was adopted as an assessment methodology for deriving fragility curves considering ground motions in near-and far-field conditions. It was deduced that the modelling (boundary conditions of pipes) was the most considerable uncertainty since it increased the probability of collapse limit state of structural members from 0 to 59%. It was also demonstrated that soil deformability as well as source conditions altered considerably the dispersion of intensity measure conditional on engineering demand parameter of structural and nonstructural members. The results may be another indication that code provisions should be more normative regarding industrial pipe racks.

Risk-aware navigation in industrial plants at risk of NaTech accidents

“…Table 1 and Table 2. Similarly, the fragility functions associated with the process equipment and pipelines were adapted from available literature (FEMA 2003(FEMA , 2012PEC 2017;Di Sarno and Karagiannakis 2020) and are given in Table 2. Since risk-aware navigation aims to ensure the life safety of plant workers, the performance limit states associated with slight or moderate damage are not of direct interest, but rather the collapse limit state which has the potential to cause harm.…”

Seismic Fragility Relationships for Structures

“…Furthermore, a sufficient number of records should be considered to account for geotechnical as well as seismotectonic characteristics of a site. The selection of an analysis method deliberately succeeds the collection of representative seismic records, because depending on the number of available seismic records, the appropriate method can be selected (Shome and Cornell 1999;Jalayer 2003;Bakalis and Vamvatsikos 2018;Di Sarno and Karagiannakis 2020). Selection of an analysis method also depends on the scale of structure, computational capacity and performance target.…”

Seismic fragility assessment of building-type structures in oil refineries

“…Research to date on the seismic fragility of oil refinery structures is unevenly distributed among them. While liquid storage tanks (e.g., Bakalis et al 2017;Spritzer and Guzey 2017;Vathi et al 2017;Phan et al 2020;Bakalis and Karamanos 2021;Caprinozzi and Dolšek 2021;Hernandez-Hernandez et al 2021;Yu and Whittaker 2021), pipe-racks (e.g., Bursi et al 2018;Di Sarno and Karagiannakis 2020;Farhan and Bousias 2020;Zhang et al 2021) and pressure vessels (e.g., Patkas and Karamanos 2007;Karakostas et al 2015;Fiore et al 2018) are considered well-studied, flare stacks, chimneys (e.g. Guo and Zhang 2019), piping systems within plants (Bursi et al 2015;Di Sarno and Karagiannakis 2020) and open-frame structures (e.g., Butenweg et al 2021) have received comparatively little attention.…”

“…While liquid storage tanks (e.g., Bakalis et al 2017;Spritzer and Guzey 2017;Vathi et al 2017;Phan et al 2020;Bakalis and Karamanos 2021;Caprinozzi and Dolšek 2021;Hernandez-Hernandez et al 2021;Yu and Whittaker 2021), pipe-racks (e.g., Bursi et al 2018;Di Sarno and Karagiannakis 2020;Farhan and Bousias 2020;Zhang et al 2021) and pressure vessels (e.g., Patkas and Karamanos 2007;Karakostas et al 2015;Fiore et al 2018) are considered well-studied, flare stacks, chimneys (e.g. Guo and Zhang 2019), piping systems within plants (Bursi et al 2015;Di Sarno and Karagiannakis 2020) and open-frame structures (e.g., Butenweg et al 2021) have received comparatively little attention. With regards to the process equipment nested in industrial frame structures, literature is again scarce (e.g., Merino Vela et al 2019), while on-ground supported equipment, such as transformer bushings (e.g., Brennan and Koliou 2020) or vessels founded at the ground level, are more widely studied and documented (Diamanti et al 2011;Wieschollek et al 2013;Korndörfer et al 2017).…”