Seismic hazard assessment for the proposed site of electric power plant: Comprehensive approach

Al-Sokhna area has been selected for installation one of the electric power plants along the Cairo-Suez Road. Unfortunately, this area lies within small-moderate seismicity area where some destructive earthquakes (>5), great number of earthquakes with magnitudes of less than 5 have been recorded. Through this work, earthquake events within a circle of 300 km radius around the selected site have been gathered, refined, and the affecting earthquake prone zones were recognized as; southern Gulf of Suez, Dahshour and Gulf of Aqaba source, Beni Suef and Sohag-Assuit zones however Dahshour zone is the nearest to the proposed site. The values of Peak Ground Acceleration have been assessed using deterministic and stochastic hazard approaches as 37.63 and 38.4 cm/sec2 respectively. Moreover, the pseudospectral acceleration (PSA) reaches 142, 96 and 74 cm/sec2 at damping values of 2%, 5% and 10% of the critical damping where the predominant period about 0.1 s at the selected site. These results have to be considered by policy and decision-makers to design more earthquake resistant structures at the selected site. ? 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The study indicates that the Al-Sokhna area is prone to frequent seismic activity, which may affect the construction of an electric power plant. Multiple earthquake prone zones were identified within a 300 km radius, highlighting the need for earthquake-resistant structures in the design process.