Seismic mitigation of piping system with control devices under tri-directional seismic excitation

Abstract

Seismic loads on piping system due to an earthquake can cause excessive vibrations, which can lead to serious instability resulting in damage or complete failure. In this paper, passive and semi-active control devices have been studied to mitigate seismic response and vibration control of piping system used in the process industries, fossil and fissile fuel power plant. A study is conducted on the performance of passive and semi-active control devices with the variation in parameters of devices and or with different control algorithms of the damper and subsequently optimum parameter of devices are obtained. The effectiveness of the passive and semi-active control devices in terms of reduction in the responses, namely, displacements, accelerations and base shear of the piping system is investigated by comparing uncontrolled responses under four different artificial earthquake motions with increasing amplitudes. The analytical results are compared with the corresponding experimental results which indicated a good match with the proposed analytical procedure for the X-plate dampers. The analytical results demonstrate that the passive and semi-active control devices under particular optimum parameters are very effective and practically implementable for the seismic response mitigation, vibration control and seismic requalification of piping systems.