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Seismic behaviour and vulnerability of buried lifelines

Objective

The overall goal of the project is the behavioural study of buried pipelines (i.e. lifelines), and the development of methods to assess the safety of lifelines after an earthquake event; the development of design features to assure their strength in seismic areas is also to be achieved.

The project includes the following research tasks:
1. Evaluation of seismic hazard The potential earthquake sources around the study area will at first be identified, by means of searching the instrumental and historical earthquake catalogues. The estimation of the potentiality of each source will be based on statistical as well as on semi-statistical methods which will be modified to take into account the local seismotectonic regime of the area.
2. Local seismic parameters Together with a fully probabilistic approach for the definition of stochastic wave parameters a first-order reliability approach is utilized for the determination of the displacement limits with their respective excursion rates and the probability of occurence of liquefaction.
3. Tools for buried lifeline analysis Finite elements for straight and curved pipe elements will be developped which account for distortion and ovalization of cross sections.
4. Validation on a real site Data of the actual condition of the buried lifeline structure will be acquired in a systematic way and will be used in an advance model to analyze its real behaviour. System models and actual behaviour are to be matched by interactive system identification methods. Conclusions will be drawn regarding applicability range and consistency of the proposed models.
5. Allowable limit state values Acceptable deformation values will be derived by implementation of the following basic steps: a) critical review of current practice; b) failure mechanisms of pipe sections; c) utility analysis.
6. Risk analysis Importance factors are to be derived either by utilization of sensitivity analysis, or by means of appropriate mathematical programming problems for a constrained minimization of a risk expression as objective function.

Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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Coordinator

GESELLSCHAFT FUER SCHWINGUNGSUNTERSUCHUNGEN UND DYNAMISCHE PRUEFMETHODEN MBH
EU contribution
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Address
Kaefertalerstrasse 164
68167 MANNHEIM
Germany

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Total cost
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Participants (4)