Bakalis K., Vamvatsikos D., Grant D.N., Mistry A. (2019). Downtime assessment of base-isolated liquid storage tanks. Proceedings of the SECED 2019 Conference, Greenwich, UK
Abstract | Seismic base isolation is examined as a design alternative for supporting industrial facility liquid storage tanks against earthquake loading. A 160,000m3 liquid storage tank is adopted as a case study, for which two designs are assessed, one with and one without base isolation. Using a nonlinear surrogate model and a set of ground motion records selected using the conditional spectrum approach for the average spectral acceleration intensity measure, Incremental Dynamic Analysis is employed to derive seismic fragility curves. Consequences of damage are evaluated in terms of downtime, considering the characteristics of petrochemical storage tanks, whereby any repair requires a lengthy list of actions dictated by health and safety requirements. The results reveal considerable benefits when base-isolation is employed, by drastically reducing downtime when sufficient displacement capacity is provided in the isolators.