• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.1-15
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• 2017

After Kyeongju earthquake occurred in September 12, 2016, the seismic safety of nuclear power plants became important issue in our country. The seismic safety of nuclear power plant against beyond design basis earthquake became very important to secure the public safety. In this paper, the current status of the seismic safety assessment methodology is reviewed and some aspects for the reliability improvement of the seismic safety assessment results are proposed. Seismic margin analysis and probabilistic seismic safety assessment have been used for the seismic safety evaluation of a nuclear power pant. The basic procedure and the related issues and proposals for the probabilistic seismic safety assessment are investigated.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.321-331
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• 2003

Seismic fragility analysis (SFA) has been utilized to evaluate the actual seismic capacity of structure and equipment in nuclear power plants (NPP). This paper briefly introduces an improved method for evaluating seismic fragilities of components of NPP's in Korea. Engineering characteristics of small magnitude earthquake spectra recorded in the Korean peninsula during the last several years are also discussed in this paper. Some significant differences between the Newmark's spectra and the recorded spectra as a site-dependent spectra are assessed. Several comparative SFA's have been performed to evaluate the effects of the recorded earthquakes on the seismic capacities of Korean NPP structures. The results showed that SFA using the Newmark's spectra might over estimate the actual seismic capacities of Korean facilities.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.3
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• pp.421-433
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• 2020

Masonry infills are normally considered as non-structural elements in design practice, therefore, the interaction between the bounding frame and the strength contribution of masonry infills is commonly ignored in the seismic analysis work of the RC frames. However, a number of typical RC frames with irregular distributed masonry infills have suffered from undesirable weak-story failure in major earthquakes, which indicates that ignoring the influence of masonry infills may cause great seismic collapse risk of RC frames. This paper presented the investigation on the risk of seismic collapse of RC frames with irregularly distributed masonry infills through a large number of nonlinear time history analyses (NTHAs). Based on the results of NTHAs, seismic fragility curves were developed for RC frames with various distribution patterns of masonry infills. It was found that the existence of masonry infills generally reduces the collapse risk of the RC frames under both frequent happened and very strong earthquakes, however, the severe irregular distribution of masonry infills, such as open ground story scenario, results in great risk of forming a weak story failure. The strong-column weak-beam (SCWB) ratio has been widely adopted in major seismic design codes to control the potential of weak story failures, where a SCWB ratio value about 1.2 is generally accepted as the lower limit. In this study, the effect of SCWB ratio on inter-story drift distribution was also parametrically investigated. It showed that improving the SCWB ratio of the RC frames with irregularly distributed masonry infills can reduce inter-story drift concentration index under earthquakes, therefore, prevent weak story failures. To achieve the same drift concentration index limit of the bare RC frame with SCWB ratio of about 1.2, which is specified in ACI318-14, the SCWB ratio of masonry-infilled RC frames should be no less than 1.5. For the open ground story scenario, this value can be as high as 1.8.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.65-80
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• 2021

Irregularities of a building in plan and elevation, which results in the change in stiffness on different floors highly affect the seismic performance and resistance of a structure. This study motivated to investigate the seismic responses of high-rise steel-frame buildings of twelve stories with various stiffness irregularities. The building has five spans of 3200 mm distance in both X- and Z-directions in the plan. The design package SAP2000 was adopted for the design of beams and columns and resulted in the profile IPE500 for the beams of all floors and box sections for columns. The column cross-section dimensions vary concerning the number of the story; one to three: 0.50×0.50×0.05m, four to seven: 0.45×0.45×0.05 m, and eight to twelve: 0.40×0.40×0.05 m. Real recorded ground accelerations obtained from the Vrancea earthquake in Romania together with dead and live loads corresponding to each story were considered for the applied load. The model was validated by comparing the results of the current method and literature considering a three-bay steel moment-resisting frame of eight-story height subject to seismic load. To investigate the seismic performance of the buildings, the time-history analysis was performed using ABAQUS. Deformed shapes corresponding to negative and positive peaks were provided followed by the story drifts and fragility curves which were used to examine the probability of collapse of the building. From the results, it was concluded that regular buildings provided a seismic performance much better than irregular buildings. Furthermore, it was observed that building with torsional irregularity was more vulnerable to seismic failure.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.581-591
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• 2023

North Anatolian Fault Zone is tectonically active with recent earthquakes (Mw7.6 1999-Kocaeli and Mw7.2 1999-Düzce earthquakes) and it passes through Marmara region, which is highly industrialized, densely populated and economically important part of Turkey. Many power plants, located in Marmara region, are exposed to high seismic hazard. In this study, open source OpenQuake software has been used for the probabilistic earthquake hazard analysis of Marmara region and risk assessment for the specified energy facility. The SHARE project seismic zonation model has been used in the analysis with the regional sources, NGA GMPEs and site model logic trees. The earthquake hazard results have been compared with the former and existing earthquake resistant design regulations in Turkey, TSC 2007 and TBSCD 2018. In the scope of the study, the seismic hazard assessment for a typical natural gas combined cycle power plant located in Marmara region has been achieved. The seismic risk assessment has been accomplished for a typical control building located in the power plant using obtained seismic hazard results. The structural and non-structural fragility functions and a consequence model have been used in the seismic risk assessment. Based on the seismic hazard level with a 2% probability of exceedance in 50 years, considered for especially these type of critical structures, the ratios of structural and non-structural loss to the total building cost were obtained as 8.8% and 45.7%, respectively. The results of the study enable the practical seismic risk assessment of the critical facility located on different regions.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.67 no.6
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• pp.587-601
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• 2018

Elevated water tanks are inverted pendulum type structures where drift limit is an important criterion for seismic design and performance evaluation. Explicit drift criteria for elevated water tanks are not available in the literature. In this study, probabilistic approach is used to determine maximum drift limit for damage state of yielding and damage state of collapse for the elevated water tanks supported on RC frame staging. The two damage states are defined using results of incremental dynamic analysis wherein a total of 2160 nonlinear time history analyses are performed using twelve artificial spectrum compatible ground motions. Analytical fragility curves are developed using two-parameter lognormal distribution. The maximum allowable drifts corresponding to yield and collapse level requirements are estimated for different tank capacities. Finally, a single fragility curve is developed which provides maximum drift values for the different probability of damage. Further, for rational consideration of the uncertainties in design, three confidence levels are selected and corresponding drift limits for damage states of yielding and collapse are proposed. These values of maximum drift can be used in performance-based seismic design for a particular damage state depending on the level of confidence.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.391-405
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• 2020

The use of passive energy dissipation devices has been widely used in the construction industry to minimize the probability of damage occurred under intense ground motion. In this study, collapse margin ratio (CMR) and fragility curves are the main parameters in the assessment to characterize the collapse safety of the structures. The assessment is done on three types of RC frame structures, incorporating three types of dampers, viscoelastic, friction, and BRB dampers. The Incremental dynamic analyses (IDA) were performed by simulating an array of 20 strong ground motion (SGM) records considering both far-field and near-field seismic scenarios that were followed by fragility curves. With respect to far-field ground motion records, the CMR values of the selected frames indicate to be higher and reachable to safety margin more than those under near-field ground motion records that introduce a high devastating impact on the structures compared to far-field excitations. This implies that the near field impact affects the ground movements at the site by attenuation the direction and causing high-frequency filtration. Besides that, the results show that the viscoelastic damper gives better performance for the structures in terms of reducing the damages compared to the other energy dissipation devices during earthquakes.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.717-733
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• 2016

Trapezoidal Cemented Sand and Gravel Dam, namely Trapezoid CSG, is a new type of dam. Due to lack of dynamic studies in the field of CSG dam, this research was performed to analyze Trapezoidal CSG dam using dynamic Finite element method with ABAQUS Software. To investigate possible earthquake-induced damages, fragility curves are plotted based on damage index, the length of the cracks created at the dam base and the area of cracked elements in the dam. The seismic analysis indicated that minimum and maximum tensions are generated in the heel and toe of the dam, respectively. According to the fragility curves, with increase in PGA, the possibility of the exceeding the defined limit state is increased. However, the rate of increment is significantly reduced after PGA=0.4 g. Also, the same result is achieved for the second limit state. The "area of cracked elements" is more conservative criterion than the "crack length at the dam base", especially at PGA<0.4 g. As conclusion, CSG dams, despite of being made of poor materials in comparison with concrete dams, show good resistance, and even in some situations, better performance than the weighted concrete dams.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.71 no.3
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• pp.305-315
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• 2019

Extremely long-span transmission tower-line system is an indispensable portion of an electricity transmission system, and its failures or collapse can impact on the entire electricity grid, affect the modern life, and cause great economic losses. It is therefore imperative to investigate the failure and safety of the transmission tower subjected to ground motions. In the present study, a detailed finite element (FE) model of a representative extremely long-span transmission tower-line system is established. A segmental damage indicator (SDI) is proposed to quantitatively assess the damage level of each segment of the transmission tower under earthquakes. Additionally, parametric studies are conducted to investigate the influence of different ground motions and incident angles on the ultimate capacity and weakest segment of the transmission tower. Finally, the collapse fragility curve in terms of the maximum SDI value and PGA is plotted for the exampled transmission tower. The results show that the proposed SDI can quantitatively assess the damage level of the segments, and thus determine the ultimate capacity and weakest segment of the transmission tower. Moreover, the different ground motions and incident angles have a significant influence on the SDI values of the transmission tower, and the collapse fragility curve is utilized to evaluate the collapse resistant capacity of the transmission tower subjected to ground motions.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.201-211
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• 2021

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety in Korea developed seismic fragility function for various building types in 2009. Damage states for most building types were determined by structural analyses of sample models and foreign references because actual cases damaged by earthquakes rarely exist in Korea. Low-rise, piloti-type buildings showed severe damage by brittle failure in columns due to insufficient stirrup details in the 2017 Pohang earthquake. Therefore, it is necessary to improve damage state criteria for piloti-type buildings by consulting actual outcomes from the earthquake. An analytical approach was conducted by developing analysis models of sample buildings reflecting insufficient stirrup details of columns to accomplish the purpose. The result showed that current spectral displacements of damage states for piloti-type buildings might be too large to estimate actual fragility. When the brittle behavior observed in the earthquake is reflected in the analysis model, one-fourth through one-sixth of current spectral displacements of damage states may be appropriate for existing low-rise, piloti-type buildings.