Numerical Simulation of Air-Steam Leakage Behaviour of Reinforced Concrete Walls

Abstract

The concept of double wall containments without liner has been developed during the last years as an alternative to reinforced concrete containments with steel liner. The leakage behaviour of prestressed concrete containment walls has been investigated with several test setups at different levels of both complexity and representation. Most of the experimental test setups showed a large variation of obtained results. The influence of steam condensation inside the cracks was taken into account by only a few experiments (Herrmann et al. 2002, Granger et al. 2001). For a better understanding of the leakage behaviour of cracks through reinforced concrete walls which are subjected to air-steam mixtures at elevated temperatures and pressures it is necessary to perform numerical simulations. A 2D Finite Element Model consisting of a fluid model and a structural model has been used to calculate the leakage behaviour of cracked concrete walls with the Finite Element Program ADINA. Further details of the structural model can be found in (Niklasch et al. 2005). In every time step the fluid model and the structural model are solved iteratively.