Reliability of Industrial-Scale Telescopes in the Event of Seismic Failures

Abstract

Natural disasters have the potential to pose a significant threat to property, critical infrastructure, human health and safety, and some others. One of the most relevant natural disasters is earthquakes, which are high on the list of natural phenomena that most affect infrastructures and, at the same time, are the most unpredictable. This study uses the probabilistic seismic risk analysis method to estimate the condition of an industrial-scale telescope after the effect of an earthquake. The approach considers a seismic source model and ground motion prediction equations to evaluate the intensity measure of each telescope as a function of its location. The implemented simulation uses reliability via Monte Carlo method to discover the probability of failure of each telescope taking into consideration the fragility curves described by its natural structure. Their method incorporates terrain characteristics and component robustness into the analysis of telescope performance at an affordable computational cost. The proposed method was applied to the observatories using industrial-scale telescopes established in Chile, and it was confirmed that reliability is highly dependent on the robustness or fragility of the infrastructure.

Keywords

• Telecommunication network reliability
• geographically correlated failures
• fragility functions
• seismic risk analysis
• simulation