Seismic Response Prediction of NUPEC’s Field Model Tests of NPP Structures With Adjacent Building Effect

As part of a verification test program for seismic analysis computer codes for Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) structures, the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation (NUPEC) of Japan has conducted a series of field model tests to address the dynamic cross interaction (DCI) effect on the seismic response of NPP structures built in close proximity to each other. The program provided field data to study the methodologies commonly associated with seismic analyses considering the DCI effect. As part of a collaborative program between the United States and Japan on seismic issues related to NPP applications, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sponsored a program at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to perform independent seismic analyses which applied common analysis procedures to predict the building response to recorded earthquake events for the test models with DCI effect. In this study, two large-scale DCI test model configurations were analyzed: 1) twin reactor buildings in close proximity and 2) adjacent reactor and turbine buildings. This paper describes the NUPEC DCI test models, the BNL analysis using the SASSI 2000 program, and comparisons between the BNL analysis results and recorded field responses. To account for large variability in the soil properties, the conventional approach of computing seismic responses with the mean, mean plus and minus one-standard deviation soil profiles is adopted in the BNL analysis and the three sets of analysis results were used in the comparisons with the test data. A discussion is also provided in the paper to address 1) the capability of the analysis methods to capture the DCI effect, and 2) the conservatism of the practice for considering soil variability in seismic response analysis for adjacent NPP structures.