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MCEER Establishes Industrial Consortium to Investigate Seismic Behavior of Restraint and Isolation Systems for Equipment

• Shake table testing of HVAC equipment mounted on restraint systems is in progress at UB

MCEER and several industrial partners joined forces to form a new consortium to examine the seismic performance of seismic restraints and isolation devices for large institutional equipment, such as HVAC systems. The work is funded by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) through its Technical Committee 2.7. The Committee is interested in developing testing and certification standards to allow individual components of a system to be certified so that the capabilities of the entire system can be evaluated without testing it as one unit. Saeed Fathali, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at UB, is conducting the research under the supervision of Andre Filiatrault, Professor of Civil Engineering and MCEER’s Deputy Director.

The three year effort began in April 2005, with the aim of providing guidance on the seismic design and retrofit of equipment with restraint and isolation systems obtained from shake table testing. Experimental seismic fragility curves for various limit states will also be constructed based on the test data. All the experimental work will be conducted in the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory (SEESL) at the University at Buffalo.

A Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), chaired by James A. Carlson of Omaha Public Power District, has overall responsibility for the project. Other TOC members include Patrick J. Lama, Mason Industries; Patrick C. Marks, York International Corporation Engineered Systems, North America; Greg Meeuwsen, TRANE, An American Standard Company, Acoustics & Analysis Technology; Paul Meisel, Kinetics Noise Control; and Robert Simmons, Amber/Booth Co. TOC members are volunteers, and are selected by ASHRAE. They will set goals and policy, approve research plans, budgets and final reports, and provide direct input of the project results to industry.

ASHRAE is an international membership organization founded to advance the arts and sciences of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration and related human factors.