View article

Assessment of seismic vulnerability of industrial petrochemical and oil & gas piping systems can be performed, beyond analytical tools, through experimental testing as well. Along this line, this paper describes an experimental test campaign carried out on a full-scale piping system in order to assess its seismic behaviour. In particular, a typical industrial piping system, containing several critical components, such as elbows, a bolted flange joint and a Tee joint, was tested under different levels of realistic earthquake loading. They corresponded to serviceability and ultimate limit states for support structures as suggested by modern performance-based earthquake engineering standards. The so called hybrid simulation techniques namely, pseudo-dynamic and real time testing with dynamic substructuring, were adopted to perform seismic tests. Experimental results displayed a favourable performance of the piping …