Seismic fragility assessment of building-type structures in oil refineries

Abstract

A seismic fragility assessment methodology is presented for equipment-supporting reinforced concrete and steel buildings that are typically encountered in oil refineries. Using a suite of hazard-consistent ground motions and reduced-order models, incremental dynamic analysis is performed to obtain the seismic demand of the structural systems examined.Appropriate drift-and floor acceleration-sensitive failure modes are considered to define the limit state capacities of the supporting structure and the nested non-structural process equipment. Special care is exercised on the demand and capacity representation of structural and non-structural components, offering a transparent roadmap for undertaking analytical fragility assessment for equipment-supporting buildings typical to an oil refinery. The findings and the proposed methodology can be exploited by designers and facility managers for mitigating the risk of failure prior to the occurrence of an earthquake event, for designing the pertinent structures and their non-structural components by means of a risk-aware performance-based methodology, or as feed data in early warning systems.

A novel web-based decision support tool for enhancing urban resilience and sustainability

“…Hence, one may adopt analytical, empirical or hybrid methodologies for assessing the vulnerability of either individual assets or classes against a certain peril. In the latter case, index assets are utilized to characterize a certain class that is formulated from assets with similar influential characteristics and relatively homogeneous anticipated performance−although this is not always the case, as it is for instance showcased by relevant studies 27 . Other vulnerability methodologies are those founded upon vulnerability matrices or a set of attributes or indicators.…”

Acceleration-sensitive ancillary elements in industrial facilities: alternative seismic design approaches in the new Eurocode

“…An equipment-supporting reinforced concrete (RC) moment resisting frame (Fig. 2), adapted from Kazantzi et al (2022a), is considered as the case study. This is a typical refinery building, designed for Zone 3 according to the new seismic hazard zonation proposed for Greece by Pitilakis et al (2022).…”

“…In general, the simplest approaches for the design of most acceleration-sensitive ancillary elements are founded on two common important assumptions: (a) the component mass is small relatively to the mass of the supporting structure, justifying not accounting for component-structure interaction, and (b) the supporting structural element(s) (e.g., the concrete slab) are stiff enough to avoid being affected by the vibrating components. If both conditions are satisfied, then one may decouple the problem by first analysing/designing the supporting structure and then using the resulting displacements/accelerations at the location of the ancillary component(s) or its anchorage point(s) to analyse/design the component (e.g., Merino Vela et al 2019;Kazantzi et al 2022a). As a remark, there are no universally-accepted mass and stiffness thresholds/criteria to define the applicability range of the aforementioned, so-called, cascade method (Lee and Chen 1975;Taghavi and Miranda 2008).…”