The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Seismic response and reliability of electrical substation equipment and systems

Song, Junho; Der Kiureghian, Armen; Sackman, Jerome L.

PEER-2005/16, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 2006-04, (400/P33/2005-16)

This report aims at developing analytical models and methods for assessing the seismic response of electrical substation equipment connected by assemblies of rigid-bus and flexible connectors and the reliability of electrical substation systems subjected to stochastic earthquake loading. A parallel aim is to develop practical guidelines for the design of connected equipment items to reduce the adverse effect of dynamic interaction under earthquake loading. Attention is also given to developing systematic methods for identifying critical components and cut sets within the electrical substation system. An electrical substation equipment item is idealized as a single-degree-of-freedom oscillator by describing its deformation in terms of an assumed displacement shape function. The validity and accuracy of this idealization for interaction studies are examined for an example pair of connected equipment items. The hysteretic behaviors of several rigid-bus connectors are described by differential equation models fitted to experimental data or to hysteresis loops predicted by detailed finite element analysis. Efficient nonlinear time-history and random vibration analyses methods are developed for determining the seismic response of the connected equipment items. Based on the developed analytical models and methods, the effect of interaction in the connected equipment system is investigated through extensive parametric studies. The results lead to practical guidelines for the seismic design of interconnected electrical substation equipment.

Available online: http://peer.berkeley.edu/publications/peer_reports/reports_2005/PEER516_SONG_Derk.pdf