Effect of ground motion frequency content on nuclear power plants including soil-structure interaction

Effect of ground motion frequency content on nuclear power plants including soil-structure interaction

Mohamed ELSHARAWY

Abstract. The study presented in this paper examines the impact of earthquakes with different frequency content on containment nuclear structures. Three sets of strong ground motion records (i.e., nine ground motions in total) were analyzed with low, medium and high Acceleration/Velocity ratio. The selected earthquakes all fall in the west coast of North America Region. Comparison with the design spectra for the west coast given in the US-NUREG (2001) has shown that the average spectrum of the nine selected earthquakes is in good agreement with the WUS design spectrum. Two cases of the foundation have been considered namely, fixed case and flexible case. In the flexible case the soil-structure interaction is considered rock and clay (i.e., firm to stiff clay soil) soil profiles. The effect of all earthquakes on the structure responses has been examined in the two foundation cases. The results show that there is correlation among the earthquakes with different A/V ratio and the estimated responses. Additionally, the soil structure interaction has significant impact on the responses, and it increases with increasing the design ground motion intensity.

Keywords
Nuclear Structures, Soil Structure Interaction, Containment Buildings, Seismic Analysis, Earthquake Frequency Content

Published online 2/25/2025, 10 pages
Copyright © 2025 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA

Citation: Mohamed ELSHARAWY, Effect of ground motion frequency content on nuclear power plants including soil-structure interaction, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 48, pp 607-616, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644903414-66

The article was published as article 66 of the book Civil and Environmental Engineering for Resilient, Smart and Sustainable Solutions

Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

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