The Study on advanced seismic simulation technology for huge plant

Guo, Z.; Nishida, Akemi  ; Nakajima, Norihiro  

Seismic estimation for huge plants including nuclear power facilities after the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake becomes more important. As usual, the joints connected different parts of structure have been often treated as boundary conditions based on a simple assumption in modeling of huge structures such as plants. However, the actual connections are complicated, so the stresses exceeding the designed value may occur sometimes. Therefore it is extremely important to investigate local stress distributions in detail for confirming the validity of design, and then if the situations unexpected in the design are found, it is necessary to modify the design. Our objective in the present study is to clarify modelling issues through comparisons of results from different modeling approaches and to propose a solution for the modelling issue. In this work, we apply different modelling approaches to a real plant structure, and analyze differences in their mechanical behaviors.