Experimental and numerical investigation on seismic performance of SRC variable-column exterior joints in CAP1400 NPP

Abstract

The experimental and numerical investigations were carried out on conventional island steam turbine workshop of Rongcheng CAP1400 steel reinforced concrete (SRC) nuclear power plant in Shandong Province as the prototype. Four SRC variable-column exterior joints with a scale of 1/4 were designed for experimentally investigated under repetitive reversed cyclic loading. The failure process, failure modes, hysteresis loops, skeleton curves, bearing capacity and energy dissipation capacity of the joints were presented and analyzed in detail. Furthermore, finite element analyses based on ABAQUS software were performed to study the influence of different parameters on seismic performance of SRC variable-column exterior joints, and the parameters included the sectional height of SRC beam, sectional size of upper and lower columns, yield strength of section steel, axial compression ratio and steel content. Parametric researches and the tests suggested that the bearing capacity, energy dissipation and ductility of the joint were significantly affected by the sectional height of SRC beam, sectional size of upper and lower columns and steel content. The yield strength of section steel and axial compression ratio has little influence on the bearing capacity, stiffness and energy dissipation. Moreover, it was suggested that the internal section steel of the joints should be of Q345 steel grade and above, hoping to provide reference for seismic design of engineering application.