Abstract: The seismic vulnerability of large-scale liquid hydrocarbon containment vessels represents one of the most consequential unresolved challenges in critical industrial infrastructure protection, as evidenced by the cascading fires, environmental contamination, and prolonged operational disruptions that have followed tank failures in major earthquakes worldwide. Existing retrofit strategies, overwhelmingly predicated on the addition of shell stiffening rings, local thickening of shell courses, or enhanced anchorage systems, address the strength and stability dimensions of the seismic response problem while leaving the fundamental energy dissipation deficit unaddressed, a limitation that has become increasingly untenable as resilience-based design frameworks demand not merely collapse prevention but assured post-earthquake leak-tight integrity. The findings establish that the electrolytic honeycomb damper, in its baseline configuration employing a twelve-millimeter cell side length, a one-and-a-half-millimeter cell wall thickness, a two-meter active damper height, and a magnetic flux density of 0.85 tesla generated by a neodymium-iron-boron Halbach array, imparts an equivalent viscous damping ratio of 16.7 percent of critical to the fundamental impulsive mode of the tank-fluid system, representing an eight-fold augmentation relative to the intrinsic damping of the unretrofitted welded steel shell. This damping augmentation translates into a 38 percent reduction in the spatially averaged peak impulsive hydrodynamic pressure acting on the tank wall at the design basis earthquake level, from 84.6 kilopascals to 52.4 kilopascals, while the radial stiffening action of the bonded honeycomb core elevates the median critical buckling acceleration by 45 percent, from 0.51g to 0.74g, with an accompanying reduction in the record-to-record variability of the buckling capacity. The in-situ reactivation concept, demonstrated through a ten-cycle degradation-reactivation sequence on the experimental model, achieves a reactivation efficiency of 98.2 percent after the first cycle and retains in excess of 90 percent of the initial damping capacity after the equivalent of fifty years of service life, confirming that the electrochemical degradation historically regarded as the fatal flaw of electrolytic damping can be effectively reversed through periodic controlled application of a reverse-polarity charging current that exploits the fully reversible redox chemistry of the selected vanadium couple. The dimensionless design correlations that relate the equivalent viscous damping ratio and the hydrodynamic pressure reduction factor to the damper geometric parameters, the magnetic field strength, and the electrolyte properties are presented in tabular and graphical form, constituting a self-contained design methodology suitable for adoption into seismic retrofit practice. The broader significance of this work lies in its demonstration that a bio-inspired honeycomb architecture can synergistically integrate mechanical, electromagnetic, and electrochemical functions into a single multi-physical device, establishing a paradigm that may be extended to the seismic protection of other classes of critical infrastructure for which conventional damping technologies are unsuitable and opening a new interdisciplinary territory at the intersection of structural engineering, electrochemistry, and magneto hydrodynamics.
Dizaji* et al. (Tue,) studied this question.