Reliability of industrial-scale telescopes in the event of seismic failures

Abstract

Natural disasters have the potential to pose a significant threat to property, critical infrastructure, human health and safety, and some others. One of the most relevant natural disasters is earthquakes, which are high on the list of natural phenomena that most affect infrastructures and, at the same time, are the most unpredictable. This study uses the probabilistic seismic risk analysis method to estimate the condition of an industrial-scale telescope after the effect of an earthquake. The approach considers a seismic source model and ground motion prediction equations to evaluate the intensity measure of each telescope as a function of its location. Our simulation uses reliability via Monte Carlo to discover the probability of failure of each telescope taking into consideration the fragility curves described by its nature structure. Our method incorporates terrain characteristics and component robustness into the analysis of telescope performance at an affordable computational cost. We applied our method to the observatories that use industrial-scale telescopes established in Chile, and we showed that reliability is highly dependent on the robustness/fragility of the infrastructure. MSC Classification: 62P12 , 62P30 , 90B25