A Physical modeling approach for seismic response estimation of nuclear power plant structures

Quinay, P. E. B.; Ichimura, Tsuyoshi*; Hori, Muneo*; Nishida, Akemi  

In this study, a physical modeling-based approach, the fault-structure system (FSS) analysis is presented for estimating the response of nuclear power plant structure under a scenario earthquake. To efficiently solve the FSS, a method based on multi-scale approach, the Macro-Micro Analysis (MMA) method (Ichimura and Hori, 2007) is used. Results show that the complicated response of the structure can be modeled by using the FSS. In order to obtain high resolution crust structure information for FSS analysis, an inversion method that minimizes an objective function by step-wise increase in target frequency is presented. This study takes advantage of the present computational resources to obtain high resolution outputs for seismic analysis of important structures.