• The tremendous impact of natural hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, etc, which triggered technological accidents, referred to as natural-technological (NaTech) events, was demonstrated by: i) the recent Tohoku earthquake and the following Fukushima disaster in 2011; ii) the UK’s 2015 winter floods which topped £5bn, with thousands of families and businesses that faced financial problems because of inadequate or non-existent insurance. The NaTech problem is quite relevant as up to 10% of industrial accidents, involving the release of CBRNE substances, were triggered by natural hazards. To implement and support the Seveso III Directive 2018/18/EU which regulates the control of major accident hazards involving dangerous substances, XP-RESILIENCE intended to establish a network of fourteen individual research projects working towards Advanced Modelling and Protection -via metamaterial-based isolators/layouts- of Complex Engineering Systems for Disaster Reduction and Resilient Communities.
• Although the number of lives lost each year for NaTech events is reduced, the recovery costs of major disasters continue to rise. In fact, each year, NaTech disasters cause an estimated $52 billion in damages in the United States in terms of life lost, disruption of commerce, properties destroyed, and the costs of mobilizing emergency response personnel and equipment. Similar figures apply to Europe.
• The specific scientific objectives of XP-RESILIENCE are:
- to provide a comprehensive overview of risk-based evaluation approaches to “special” and “normal risk” petrochemical plants and components and to set a probabilistic-based assessment/design methodology; to select two special representative petrochemical plants and sub-plants for probabilistic risk-based evaluation/design; to define methods to treat extreme hazards;
- to collect experimental data for soil-structure interaction of shallow and deep foundations for critical components of industrial plants; to conceive novel smart layouts of boreholes/tanks and metafoundations based on metamaterial concepts to mitigate seismic shear waves.
- to set stick FE models and perform numerical simulations of critical components/subsystems; use the volume of simulation data acquired/produced to build fragility functions.
- development of a systematic list of top events and accident conditions caused by hazards on plant components leading to a loss of containment or physical damage owing to seismic-induced blast, fire and flooding; development of a methodology to generate accident scenarios and propagation of uncertainties in a Domino-like fashion; development of a method to compute synthetic performance estimation parameters, e.g. risk indices etc., expressing risk of a plant and a method to rank criticalities of process units; application of the risk-based procedure and resilience to the Case Studies plants.
- selection of appropriate signals, signal features and sensors; optimal sensor locations and communication network for gathering data; verification and validation of the monitoring system.
- selection of QRA-based design of petrochemical plants with community disaster resilience; application of metamaterial-based concepts/devices for vibration mitigation to components of two Case Studies; recommendations for extension of Eurocodes.
- implementation of vulnerability scenarios for probabilistic risk analysis; development of a risk/resilience index.
