Project R-6492

Seismic protection of industrial plants by enhanced steel based systems (Research)

Recent earthquakes, as the one that hit Fukushima in Japan in 2011 or the one that produced extensive damage in Turkish petrochemical facilities during the Kocaeli earthquake of 1999 or, more recently, the seismic events in May 2012 in Emilia (Italy), highlighted the increasing need of providing adequate protection to industrial installations. Industrial facilities often store a large amount of hazardous material and, in case of seismic event, there is a high probability that accidental scenarios as fire, explosion, toxic or radioactive dispersion may occur. In these cases, the ensuing disaster certainly harms the people working in the installation and it may endanger the population living in the neighbourhood or in the urban area where the industrial installation is located. In particular, as testified by past disasters, process plants, like process units, storage units and pipelines or piping systems, are characterized by higher levels of seismic risk than other types of installations. The consequences of such accidental scenarios can be disastrous in terms of casualties, economic losses and environmental damage. The proposed research programme aims at developing and setting up innovative seismic protection systems, both for the design of new industrial plants and for the retrofit of existing ones, based on seismic isolation and energy dissipation techniques. The seismic protection systems considered in this programme will be of the Isolation (IS) and of the Energy Dissipation (EDS) types and they shall be devised to fulfil the requirements peculiar to each typology of industrial plant considered. Particular attention will be paid to the self-centring capability of these systems, since this is an essential feature that allows the industrial facility not to discontinue its operations even after a strong earthquake and that makes eventual repair works easier. The development and design of such systems will be supported, both, by experimental tests, necessary to achieve a complete understanding of the actual behaviour of the new devices under monotonic and cyclic loadings, and by a detailed mechanical modelling, both of linear and non-linear nature. Moreover, in order to overcome the difficulties related to the design and the installation of such enhanced protection systems on industrial plants, practical installation procedures and simplified (linear) design procedures will be developed. Such procedures will be then verified on the basis of applications to selected case studies and on the results of advanced non-linear analysis. Finally, recommendations and design rules will be developed by drafting pre-normative documents to be proposed for future enhancements of the Eurocodes.

01 July 2015 - 31 December 2016