Abstract
There is a large water storage tank installed at the top of containment of AP1000, which can supply the passive cooling. In the extreme condition, sloshing of the free surface in the tank may impact on the roof under long-period earthquake. For the safety assessment of structure, it is necessary to calculate the impact pressure caused by water sloshing. Since the behavior of sloshing impacted on the roof is involved into a strong nonlinear phenomenon, it is a little difficult to calculate such pressure by theoretical or numerical method currently. But it is applicable to calculate the height of sloshing in a tank without roof. In the present paper, a simplified method was proposed to calculate the impact pressure using the sloshing wave height, in which we first marked the position of the height of roof, then produced sloshing in the tank without roof and recorded the maximum wave height, and finally regarded approximately the difference between maximum wave height and roof height as the impact pressure head. We also designed an experiment to verify this method. The experimental result showed that this method overpredicted the impact pressure with a certain error of no more than 35%. By the experiment, we conclude that this method is conservative and applicable for the engineering design.
Highlights
As the ultimate heat sink of AP1000 reactor, passive cooling system (PCS) is the key equipment to ensure the safety of nuclear power plant
Due to the apparent nonlinear behavior caused by complicated sloshing phenomena, a simplified method was proposed to calculate the impact pressure using the sloshing wave height, in which we first marked the position of the height of roof, the solid wide line showed in Figure 1, produced sloshing in the tank without roof and recorded the maximum wave height which can be shown as the oblique line in Figure 1, and regarded approximately the difference between maximum wave height and roof height as the impact pressure head
For each case, sloshing experiments under multiple excitation amplitudes were carried out and several kinds of transient sloshing responses like sloshing wave height and slosh-induced impact pressure were recorded by data acquisition system
Summary
As the ultimate heat sink of AP1000 reactor, passive cooling system (PCS) is the key equipment to ensure the safety of nuclear power plant. Eswaran et al [5] proposed a numerical method based on volume of fluid (VOF) techniques with arbitraryLagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation to analyze baffled and unbaffled tanks with a nonlinear sloshing behavior. These researches are usually valid for simple cases with linear or weakly nonlinear liquid sloshing dynamics. Virella et al [7] used the finite element package ABAQUS to investigate the free surface wave amplitude and pressure distribution of tank wall by both linear wave theory and nonlinear wave theory models. A simplified method was proposed to calculate the impact pressure using the sloshing wave height.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
