Sensitivity of the Effective Seismic Support Damping in a Class I Piping System to Analysis Parameters

It is understood that the level of seismic damping in a piping system is strongly influenced by the supports. Put differently, the supports contribute to an effective damping that can be considered in the seismic analysis of the piping system. This paper investigates the issue for the feeder pipes of a CANDU™ reactor. Feeders are numerous class I pipes in parallel, which are separated by frictional spacer elements. The results of a time history analysis, taking into account different damping mechanisms, are compared to those from a response spectrum analysis to deduce the effective damping in the system. The sensitivity of the effective damping to different parameters, such as the coefficient of friction and the input frequency content, is investigated.