Effects of a Gyroscope in Reducing Rocking Motion of a Rigid Vessel Coupled With Inner Structure Subjected to a Base Excitation Available to Purchase

Many spent fuels coming out of the nuclear power station are planned to be stored in the special site in Japan until they are reprocessed. In this site, the spent fuels are installed in a cylindrical container called canister. The canister, in tern, will be installed in the outer cylinder called cask that is a free-standing structure. When this system is subjected to strong seismic excitations, sliding or rocking motion will be induced. And, in the worst case, the cask may collide to each other or overturn. Therefore, it is very important to reduce sliding and rocking motions of the cask in order to avoid the consequent contamination of radio active substances. The authors have already reported the studies on the sliding and rocking motions of the cask subjected to a seismic excitation that contains a vibration system in it, and clarified the effects of the vibration of the inner canister. It was shown that the inner canister gives very large influences on the sliding and rocking motions of the outer cask. In this study, we applied a gyroscope at the top of the outer cask for reducing rocking motion of the cask. The effects of the gyroscope are studied for various excitation frequencies, excitation amplitudes and the structural dimensions of the gyroscope such as weight and rotational frequency. It is found that the gyroscope is very effective for reducing rocking motions of the cask-canister system subjected to seismic excitations.