Soil-structure interaction of nuclear power plant

Abstract

Nuclear power plants are special facilities with large foundation designs, located in areas with good geology. However, in areas where seismic loads need to be considered, analyzing the soilstructure interaction of nuclear power plants is essential. Nonlinear analyses of soil-structure interaction can be performed in the time domain or frequency domain. Time domain analysis has the advantage of easily incorporating nonlinear material models or geometric nonlinearity. However, this method is limited by the boundary conditions of the geological region near the structure, as current analysis methods assume vertically propagating seismic waves towards the structure. This assumption is made to limit the errors that finite element methods can introduce at the boundaries. This paper presents a new computational method that combines finite element method and boundary element method, in which the propagation of seismic waves towards the structure can be considered at a predetermined angle. The paper analyzes the impact of wave propagation on the response spectrum of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 7. The results of the analysis show that the new computational method can consider the influence of the angle of incoming wave on the soil-structure interaction analysis.