Resilience Calculation of Process Plants Under Seismic Loading: A Case Study

Earthquakes causes approximately 8% of total accidents in industrial facilities. Although there are several researches in literature pertaining to industrial resilience, none of them provides a modelling framework to quantify the seismic resilience of process plants. This paper presents a methodology for providing a quantitative measure of resilience and business economic losses for the process plants in case of a seismic event. The two main parameters which have utmost influence on the resilience of a process plant are operational capacity and recovery time, so they must be evaluated in proper way. Plant mapping and components vulnerability are the key modelling parameters of plant operational capacity. Exact recovery step functions are introduced based on General Reconstruction Activity Network (GRAN), considering interdependencies between plant components. In order to illustrate the discussed method, a nitric acid plant is set up as a case study. “PRIAMUS” software is used to generate the most probable damage scenarios, assuming the plant is located in seismic region of South Italy, Sicily. Ultimately, recovery curves are constructed for each damaged scenario, and business economic losses are calculated according to direct cost and business interruption. In short, this methodology provides a good estimation of the most critical components and economic losses of a process plant in case of a seismic event.