Seismic fragility assessment of a tall reinforced concrete chimney

摘要

In China, a considerable proportion of reinforced concrete (RC) industrial chimneys in operation was designed and constructed in accordance with less rigorous outdated seismic criteria during the end of 19th and early 20th century. However, few research works have been reported till date on a realistic overall assessment of the seismic performance of these existing aging RC chimney structures. Therefore, in this study, fragilities of existing RC chimney were studied. For this purpose, an existing 240m tall RC chimney was selected and structurally modeled with a lumped mass beam (stick) model by means of the OpenSees analysis program. In order to capture the uncertainties in ground motion realizations, a series of 21 ground motions are selected from the Next Generation Attenuation database as the input motions. To develop the analytical fragility curves, nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis of the studied RC chimney was then carried out using the selected input motions, which were normalized to different excitation levels. The section curvature ductility ratio was considered as the damage index. Based on material strain and sectional analysis, four limit states (LSs) were defined for five damage state. The seismic responses of the all sections were utilized to evaluate the likelihood of exceeding the LSs. Then the peak ground acceleration (PGA)-based seismic fragility curves of the structure were constructed assuming a lognormal distribution. Finally, under the light of these fragility curves, the damage risks in existing RC chimney were discussed. The analytical results indicated that for design level earthquake of PGA=0.1g (g is the gravitational acceleration) and the maximum considered earthquake of PGA=0.22g, the probabilities of exceeding the light damage state were around 1.5% and 44%, respectively, while the exceedance probabilities corresponding to moderate, extensive and complete damage states were approximately zero in both cases. On the other hand, fragility analysis revealed that the RC chimney structure had considerable ductility capacity and was capable to withstand a strong earthquake with some structural damages. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.