The seismically isolated nuclear power plants shall be designed for design basis earthquake (DBE) and considered to ensure safety against beyond design basis earthquake (BDBE). In order to limit the excessive displacement of the seismic isolation system of the seismically isolated structure, the moat is installed at a certain distance from the upper mat supporting the superstructure. This certain distance is called clearance to stop (CS) and is calculated from the 90th percentile displacement of seismic isolation system subjected to BDBE. For design purposes, the CS can be obtained simply by multiplying the median displacement of the seismic isolation system against DBE by scale factor with a value of 3. The DBE and BDBE used in this study were generated by using 30 sets of artificial earthquakes corresponding to the nuclear standard design spectrum. In addition, latin hyper cube sampling was applied to generate 30 sets of artificial earthquakes corresponding to maximum - minimum spectra. For the DBE, the median displacement and the 99th percentile displacement of the seismic isolation system were calculated. For the BDBE, the suitability of the scale factor was assessed after calculating the 90th percentile displacement of the seismic isolation system.
In this study, natural period formular is presented for a RC shear wall structure with H-, T-, and L-shaped wall sections. The natural period formular proposed by Goel and Chopra and adopted in ASCE 7-10 was modified by using the ratio of the flange and web wall area. The natural periods of structures with H-shaped wall were numerically obtained, the results indicated that the ASCE 7-10 could not consider the natural period variation according to the length of the flange wall, but the proposed formula could do. Especially, ASCE 7-10 estimated much longer periods than eigenvalue analysis, and this implies that conservative seismic design is difficult. The periods by eigenvalue analysis exist between the upper and lower bounds given by the proposed formula, and conservative design is possible by using the proposed lower bound value. In order to verity the effectiveness of the proposed method, actual residential buildings with various types of flange walls are considered. Ambient vibration tests, eigenvalue analyses, and nonlinear dynamic analyses were conducted and the periods were compared with the values by ASCE 7-10 and the proposed formula. The results showed that the proposed formula could estimate more accurately the periods than ASCE 7-10.
This paper proposes extension of Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) to avoid the necessity of using intervals with the same probability area where intervals with different probability areas are used. This method is called Weighted Latin Hypercube Sampling (WLHS). This paper describes equations and detail procedure necessary to apply weight function to WLHS. WLHS is verified through numerical examples by comparing the estimated distribution parameters with those from other methods such as Random Sampling and Latin Hypercube Sampling. WLHS provides more flexible way on selecting samples than LHS. Accuracy of WLHS estimation on distribution parameters is depending on the selection of weight function. The proposed WLHS is applied to seismically isolated structures in nuclear power plants. In this application, clearance-to-stops (CSs) calculated using LHS proposed by Huang et al. [1] and WLHS proposed in this paper, respectively, are compared to investigate the effect of choosing different sampling techniques.
This study develops an empirical prediction equation of spectral acceleration responses of earthquakes which can induce structural damages. Ground motion records representing hazards of low-to-moderate seismic regions were selected and organized with several influential factors affecting the response spectra. The empirical equation and estimator coefficients for acceleration response spectra were then proposed using a robust nonlinear optimization coupled with a regression analysis. For analytical verification of the prediction equation, response spectra used for low-to-moderate seismic regions were estimated and the predicted results were comparatively evaluated with measured response spectra. As a result, the predicted shapes of response spectra can simulate the graphical shapes of measured data with high accuracy and most of predicted results are distributed inside range of correlation of variation (COV) of 30% from perfectly correlated lines.
In this study, seismic performance of bushings and their connection parts was analyzed by performing shaking table tests for various types of bushings widely used as auxiliary equipment of main transformers in domestic substations. As a result of the seismic tests of five types of 154 kV bushings according to the manufacturers, all the bushings secured the structural integrity even at the acceleration of 1.4 g and it was found that leakage of insulating oil didn't occur. Also, the average acceleration amplification rate at the upper part of the bushings was about 2.5 to 3.0 times higher than the lower one. On the other hand, when a representative 345 kV bushing was subjected to the seismic test, the structural integrity was secured even at 1.0 g acceleration similar to the design earthquake load level, but in this test, leakage of insulating oil occurred. However, when a stiffener restricting the connection of the bushing is installed in the same 345 kV bushing, the displacement of the bushing connection is controlled and the stiffener prevent the oil from leaking even at the acceleration of the designed seismic level.
Diagonally reinforced concrete coupling beams (DRCB) play an important role in coupled shear wall systems since these elements dissipate most of seismic input energy under earthquake loading. For reliable seismic performance evaluation using nonlinear response history analysis, it is important to use an accurate analytical model for DRCBs. In this study, the Pinching4 model is used as a base model to simulate the cyclic behavior of DRCBs. For simulating the cyclic behavior of DRCBs using the Pinching4 model, the analytical parameters for backbone curve, pinching and cyclic deterioration in strength and stiffness should be computed. To determine the proper values of the constituent analytical parameters efficiently and accurately, this study proposes the empirical equations for the analytical parameters using regression analyses. It is shown that the hysteretic behavior of coupling beams can be simulated efficiently and accurately using the proposed numerical model with the proposed empirical equations of model parameters.