Seismic vulnerability assessment of water supply network in Tianjin, China

The water supply network (WSN) system is a critical element of civil infrastructure systems. Its complexity of operation and high number of components mean that all parts of the system cannot be simply assessed. Earthquakes are the most serious natural hazard to a WSN, and seismic risk assessment is essential to identify its vulnerability to different stages of damage and ensure the system safety. In this paper, using a WSN located in the airport area of Tianjin in northern China as a case study, a quantitative vulnerability assessment method was used to assess the damage that the water supply pipelines would suffer in an earthquake, and the finite element software ABAQUS and fuzzy mathematic theory were adopted to construct the assessment method. ABAQUS was applied to simulate the seismic damage to pipe segments and components of the WSN. Membership functions based on fuzzy theory were established to calculate the membership of the components in the system. However, to consider the vulnerability of the whole system, fuzzy cluster analysis was used to distinguish the importance of pipe segments and components. Finally, the vulnerability was quantified by these functions. The proposed methodology aims to assess the performance of WSNs based on pipe vulnerabilities that are simulated and calculated by the model and the mathematical method based on data of damage. In this study, a whole seismic vulnerability assessment method for a WSN was built, and these analyses are expected to provide necessary information for a mitigation plan in an earthquake disaster.