On the failure of spherical steel containments under excessive internal pressure

Abstract

During a hypothetical core melt accident the pressure inside the containment will gradually increase until the design limits are exceeded and finally failure of the containment occurs. The investigations showed that failure of the containment shell is governed by plastic instability. For an appropriate description of this phenomenon a numerical procedure has been developed. The adequacy of the approach could be demonstrated by applying it to some experiments, in which initially plane membranes were loaded by unilateral pressure up to failure. However, one weak part of the containment was found which is hardly amenable to theoretical investigations. This is a multi-row bolted connection which is going to be investigated by a biaxial tension test.