Cascading Hazard Analysis of a Hospital Building
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 143, Issue 9
Abstract
Recently, multihazards engineering has paid more attention to analyzing the behavior of a system exposed to different types of hazards and to estimate the loss data from cascading events attributed to the primary hazard. This paper investigates the principle of multihazards and develops a new methodology to assess the total damage of structural elements caused by cascading hazards. For each hazard, a physical model is used to assess the conditional probability of exceeding a certain intensity level due to the occurrence of the previous hazard. The method is applied to a hospital located in California subjected to three cascading hazards (earthquake, blast, and fire). Nonlinear time-history analyses are performed using seven ground motions scaled to five earthquake levels and the seismic response of the structure is evaluated. The seismic input produces damage to the hospital’s power supply (liquid propane gas reservoir tank), which may cause a blast. The probability of explosion is estimated by taking into account the probabilities of fuel leakage, fuel concentration, and ignition. A set of nine blast-intensity levels is considered in the analyses, corresponding to different quantities of fuel content inside the tank. Afterward, a fire hazard is generated following the explosion, the intensity level of which is evaluated using compartmental heat flux. The fire effects are modeled assuming an increment of temperature in the steel frames. The proposed multihazard approach can be used for both improving the structural safety and reducing the building lifecycle costs to enhance the resilience of the hospital. Results show that this methodology can be used to provide risk mitigation measures within a more general resilience framework.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under Grant Agreement No. ERC_IDEAL RESCUE_637842 of the project IDEAL RESCUE—Integrated Design and Control of Sustainable Communities during Emergencies.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 9 • September 2017
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 28, 2016
Accepted: Feb 2, 2017
Published online: May 29, 2017
Published in print: Sep 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Oct 29, 2017
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