Some considerations to the failure analysis of a pointwise attached steel liner membrane under constraint load

Abstract

In the application of reinforced or prestressed concrete reactor containments, the safety enclosure will be obtained through a steel liner membrane, which is attached pointwise to the interior concrete surface. It is the objective and aim of this study to analyse the overall structural behavior of the bonded system consisting of concrete containment, studs, and steel liner—especially under the aspect of extreme load and deformation conditions. The parametric analysis is carried out on the basis of the geometric length/depth ratio l t = 12 of a single liner field. In order to reduce the considerable computational effort to a minimum, it is necessary to decouple the overall system in its structural components, i.e., at first an imperfect predeflected ‘buckling’ field and the residual ‘plane’ liner field are considered separately. A further reduction enablesm the use of stud anchor characteristics which are based on experiments. Three-dimensional analyses are performed for the single ‘buckling’ field to obtain specific load-displacement functions; the residual plane system is considered with two- as well as one-dimensional models. For the comprehensive parametric evaluation of the overall system behaviour, a linear model is assumed to which these load-displacement functions are applied. Constraint temperatures are introduced as a unit scale—up to failure of the overall system; hereby partial structural failure might lead to temporary relief.