Abstract
The investigation of the seismic integrity of petrochemical plant steel structures should be commensurable to their importance given the high necessity for human life safety and financial robustness. To date, it is demonstrated in the existing literature that still many grey areas of knowledge exist upon the appropriate application of code provisions on non-building structures design. Indeed, the selection of seismic design parameters such as system performance factors or important classes are still vague aspects, in contrast with those for common building structures, either because of the paucity of information of seismic codes or due to the structural peculiarities that characterise the industrial structures resulting in the difficulty of defining ‘all-encompassing’ design parameters. The present paper aims at highlighting those parameters considering also a case-study that pertains to a steel pipe rack. The pipe rack is designed and analysed in the linear and nonlinear regime, both statically and dynamically, according to the Italian and European codes. American code provisions are examined as well so as possible inconsistencies might be found. It is demonstrated that the common nonlinear static analysis (pushover analysis) cannot be used to assess the response of the rack and the behaviour factor selection from current standards could be unjustifiable. Also, common engineering demand parameters, e.g. interstorey drift ratio, need further assessment vis-à-vis the response of nonstructural components of which the current design method does not comply with modern methods.
Highlights
The cruciality of non-buildings structures that constitute the petrochemical/oil refineries is significantly higher than that of common ones given the repercussions that a failure of nonstructural components may cause to the nearby units and community afterwards
This is what the research of Kidam and Hurme (2013) yielded; the inquiry of 364 chemical process industry accidents showed that piping system failures—as piping system defined any type of connection between pipework and process units—was the most frequent out of 12 apparatuses in total
The R-factor values shown in Table 2 do not consider increase of pipe rack height, since it is not considered in EN1998-1 (2004), they do account for the overstrength factor included in the pertinent table of AM code, which is equal to 3 and 2 for Moment Resisting Frames (MRFs) and CBF, respectively
Summary
The cruciality of non-buildings structures that constitute the petrochemical/oil refineries is significantly higher than that of common ones given the repercussions that a failure of nonstructural components may cause to the nearby units and community afterwards. At least to the Authors’ knowledge, there are very few research efforts that undertake the seismic design of petrochemical steel pipe racks (Bedair 2015; Di Roseto et al 2017; Drake and Walter 2010) and even these publications not in a comprehensive manner since parameters e.g. behaviour factor selection or nonbuilding structure–nonstructural components interaction are not dealt with sufficiently When it comes to codes, the main European (EN) contribution for seismic design issues (EN1998-1 2004) does not make reference to seismic design requirements of industrial structures, postulating q-factors only for steel structures (regular and irregular), which differentiate in many ways compared to the petrochemical pipe racks. The work presented does not aim at covering every aspect involved in the seismic design process of petrochemical pipe racks yet to form the starting point for further research and recommendations
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