SEISMIC FRAGILITY OF HORIZONTAL PRESSURE VESSELS - EFFECTS OF STRUCTURAL INTERACTION BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL COMPONENTS

Abstract eng:
The European project “INDUSE-2-SAFETY” aims at the development of a quantitative risk assessment methodology for seismic loss prevention of “special risk” petrochemical plants and components. To demonstrate the capabilities of this approach, a representative case study plant containing standard components is subjected to detailed investigation. Probabilistic seismic demand models are used to establish a relation between seismic demand and structural performance of the components with respect to relevant limit states. The resulting fragility curves are required as an input to the quantitative risk model. The case study comprises of a LNG regasification plant which contains various components with extreme variability in structural and dynamic characteristics. Due to process flow related requirements, all of these components are interconnected by an extensive pipe network. In case of an earthquake, these interconnections may cause significant structural interaction effects. The influence of the coupling is hard to predict and thus often neglected or estimated inappropriately in a common structural design of a single plant component. Within this paper, the effects of structural interaction are assessed rigorously for a small part of the LNG plant using finite element methods. The subplant considered for this analysis consists of a horizontal pressure vessel, connected pipes and respective supporting structures. Twenty-six natural seismic records are selected with respect to uniform site hazard spectra for three different return periods to account for a wide variability of earthquake characteristics such as magnitude, fault distance and wave content are considered in the analysis. Cloud analysis is employed to perform the probabilistic seismic demand analysis which yields the fragility of the horizontal pressure vessel. Besides the variability of the seismic input, the liquid filling level of the vessel as well as the direction of ground motion have been considered as additional sources of uncertainty.

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