Research and Development of Viscous Fluid Dampers for Improvement of Seismic Resistance of Thermal Power Plants: Part 7 — Evaluation of Lifetime Using Experimental Design Method

Abstract

In 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake that was the largest earthquake in Japanese history occurred. The earthquake had large acceleration, long duration and a lot of aftershocks, and coal-fired thermal power plants were damaged by the earthquake. Boiler structures in coal-fired thermal power plants are generally high-rise structures, and boilers are simply suspended from the top of the support structures in order not to restrict thermal expansion. Therefore boilers are easy to vibrate. In order to suppress vibration of boilers during earthquakes, stoppers are generally set between boilers and support structures. The stoppers are made of steel, and dissipate vibration energy by plastic deformation. However aseismic requirements for thermal power plants have been increased as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Thus authors have developed a vibration control damper for coal-fired power plants. The damper is set instead of conventional stopper. Construction of the damper is similar to oil dampers, but inner fluid is viscous fluid. In PVP 2017, the basic performance of the proposed damper was presented. In PVP 2018, influence of dispersion of damper properties was also investigated. In addition, seismic response analyses using various earthquakes that include long period and long duration earthquake waves were carried out. As a result of previous investigations, it was confirmed that the proposed damper has good performance in its lifetime. However, parameters of dampers were selected manually. Therefore, influence of parameters of dampers on the lifetime were evaluated theoretically by using the experimental design method in this paper. The experimental design method is one of the effective techniques for research such as investigation of the influence of the habitat environment on the growth of crops. The selection of damper parameters is complex optimization, because so many variables need to be optimized. Therefore the experimental design method is suitable technique for the evaluation of damper parameters. This paper evaluates lifetime of dampers from the viewpoint of the experimental design method.