Behind the scenes of chemical process plants

Off-Site Modular Construction (OSMC) research has been a growing research area over the past two decades because of low productivity in construction. Tools are superior in factories and productivity is much higher compared to a stick built site. This has spawned the development small, factory built, rapidly deployable and flexible process plants to take advantage of the gains in OSMC productivity. Chemical process plant research is studying fast, automated design and configuration. In this paper, a literature review was performed on modular factory manufactured process plants. The literature review found that moving to small scale OSMC plant systems could enable cost and schedule savings and months of design time compared to the previous on-site assembly design. It was also found that while automation has been applied in earlier stages of the plant design process, a layout optimisation methodology has not been applied to small OSMC process plants. The paper then proposes to utilise a mathematical layout optimisation model to help design and construct modular process plants and considers how this may fit into the process plant design process, as well as considering the transport requirements for modules.

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Seismic Fragility Analysis of a Coupled Tank-Piping System based on Artificial Ground Motions and Surrogate Modeling

10.31224/osf.io/qf9ep ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Giuseppe Abbiati ◽

Marco Broccardo ◽

Rocco di Filippo ◽

Bozidar Stojadinovic ◽

Oreste S. Bursi

Keyword(s):

Risk Assessment ◽

Earthquake Engineering ◽

Chemical Process ◽

Computational Cost ◽

System Level ◽

Process Equipment ◽

Piping System ◽

Component Level ◽

Process Plants ◽

Level Model

The catastrophic consequences of recent NaTech events triggered by earthquakes highlighted the inadequacy of standard approaches to seismic risk assessment of chemical process plants. To date, the risk assessment of such facilities mainly relies on historical data and focuses on uncoupled process components. As a consequence, the dynamic interaction between process equipment is neglected. In response to this gap, researchers started a progressive integration of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) risk assessment framework. However, a few limitations still prevent a systematic implementation of this framework to chemical process plants. The most significant are: i) the computational cost of system-level simulations accounting for coupling between process equipment; ii) the experimental cost for component-level model validation; iii) a reduced number of hazard-consistent site-specific ground motion records for time history analyses.In response to these challenges, this paper proposes a recently developed uncertainty quantification-based framework to perform seismic fragility assessments of chemical process plants. The framework employs three key elements: i) a stochastic ground-motion model to supplement scarcity of real records; ii) surrogate modeling to reduce the computational cost of system-level simulations; iii) a component-level model validation based on cost-effective hybrid simulation tests. In order to demonstrate the potential of the framework, two fragility functions are computed for a pipe elbow of a coupled tank-piping system.

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