Valutazione della fragilità sismica delle strutture edilizie nelle raffinerie petrolifere

Citation

Kazantzi, A.K., Karaferis, N.D., Melissianos, V.E., Bakalis, K., Vamvatsikos, D. (2022). Seismic fragility assessment of building-type structures in oil refineries. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 20, 6853 to 6876.

Read the full article via DOI ›
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-022-01476-y

Summary

Oil refineries concentrate high value, high hazard operations in a small number of structures whose failure carries consequences far beyond the asset itself, from supply interruption to environmental and safety events. This paper sets out a seismic fragility assessment methodology for the reinforced concrete and steel buildings that support critical equipment across a refinery. Using a suite of hazard consistent ground motions and reduced order models, the authors perform incremental dynamic analysis to obtain the seismic demand on each structural system, then define limit state capacities against drift and floor acceleration sensitive failure modes, treating both the supporting structure and the nested non structural process equipment. Particular care is taken over how demand and capacity are represented, so the result is a transparent, repeatable roadmap that designers and facility managers can apply to mitigate the risk of failure before an earthquake, prioritise strengthening, and feed quantified fragilities into the wider seismic risk assessment of the site. For Resilience Guard, work of this kind underpins the operational resilience of energy and critical infrastructure clients, where continuity planning has to rest on a defensible understanding of how physical assets actually behave under extreme load.

About this research

This work forms part of Resilience Guard's contribution to European research, where the firm's consultants develop and test methods in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe consortia and apply them in client engagements. See the research portfolio for the projects behind the publications, and the case studies for the practice they inform.