Abstract

This paper presents and discusses the recent developments related to seismic performance and assessment of buried pipelines. The experience from the performance of pipelines during last earthquakes provided invaluable information and lead to new developments in the analysis and technologies. Especially, the pipeline performance during Canterbury earthquake sequence in New Zealand is taken as a case study here. The data collected for the earthquake sequence are unprecedented in size and detail, involving ground motion recordings from scores of seismograph stations, high resolution light detection and ranging (LiDAR) measurements of vertical and lateral movements after each event, and detailed repair records for thousands of km of underground pipelines with coordinates for the location of each repair. One of the important learnings from the recent earthquakes is that some earthquake resistant design and technologies proved to be working. This provides a motivation to increase international exchange and cooperation on earthquake resistant technologies. Another observation is that preventive maintenance is important to reduce the pipeline damage risk from seismic and other hazards. To increase the applicability and sustainability, seismic improvements should be incorporated into the pipe replacement and asset management programs as part of the preventive maintenance concept. However, it is also important to put in the most proper pipeline from the start as replacing or retrofitting the pipelines later requires substantial investment. In this respect, seismic considerations should be taken into account properly in the design phase. © The Author(s) 2015. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

International audience; In recent years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the analysis of failure modes occurring in railway infrastructure assets, e.g. bridges, rail tracks, sleepers, etc. However, there have been few attempts by researchers to develop failure criticality assessment models for railway rolling stock. A rolling stock failure may be very costly in terms of monetary loss and/or passenger inconvenience. It may also cause delays to train services or even result in catastrophic derailment accidents. In this paper, a failure mode, effects and criticality analysis approach is presented to identify, analyse and evaluate the causes and consequences of rolling stock failures. The most critical failure modes with respect to both reliability and economics are identified and potential protective measures are then proposed to prevent their recurrence. For the purpose of illustrating the proposed approach, the model is applied to a rolling stock passenger door system. The data required for the study are collected from both the literature and the maintenance information system available in a Scottish train operating company. The results of this study can be used to plan a cost-effective preventive maintenance programme for different components of rolling stock.