MCEER Industrial Consortium on Restraint and Isolation Systems for Equipment

HVAC equipment on shake table; a man sits on edge of shake table

Seismic testing of HVAC equipment equipped with restraint and isolation systems is the focus of MCEER-ASHRAE consortium

MCEER and several industrial partners joined forces to form a new consortium to examine the 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, which has an interest in developing testing and certification standards that will allow individual components of a system to be certified in such a way as to make evaluation of the system capabilities possible without testing the entire system as one unit. MCEER’s Deputy Director Andre Filiatrault is the lead investigator of the project.

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 isolations 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. 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.