Abstract
It is crucial for important facilities to withstand strong earthquakes because their damage may cause undesirable socio-economic effect. A liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal is one of the lifeline facilities whose seismic safety needs to be guaranteed. Even though all operating LNG receiving terminals in Korea were seismically designed, old design codes do not guarantee to comply with the current seismic design codes. In addition, if the constructional materials have been deteriorated, the seismic capacity of facilities may be also deteriorated. Therefore, it is necessary that the seismic performance of LNG receiving terminals is evaluated and the facilities that lack of seismic capacity have to be rehabilitated. In this paper, a procedure of seismic performance evaluation of such facilities is developed such that the procedure consists of three phases, namely pre-analysis, analysis, and evaluation phases. In the pre-analysis phase, design documents are reviewed and walk-on inspection is performed to determine the current state of the material properties. In the analysis phase, a structural analysis under a given earthquake or a seismic effect is performed to determine the seismic response of the structure. In the evaluation phase, seismic performance of the structure is evaluated based on limit states. Two of the important facilities, i.e. the submerged combustion vaporizer (SMV) and pipe racks of one of the Korean LNG receiving terminals are selected and evaluated according to the developed procedure. Both of the facilities are safe under the design level earthquake.
