Analysis of the 2016 Gyeongju earthquake and the 2017 Pohang earthquake showed the characteristics of a typical high-frequency earthquake with many high-frequency components, short time strong motion duration, and large peak ground acceleration relative to the magnitude of the earthquake. Domestic nuclear power plants were designed and evaluated based on NRC's Regulatory Guide 1.60 design response spectrum, which had a great deal of energy in the low-frequency range. Therefore, nuclear power plants should carry out seismic verification and seismic performance evaluation of systems, structures, and components by reflecting the domestic characteristics of earthquakes. In this study, high-frequency amplification factors that can be used for seismic verification and seismic performance evaluation of nuclear power plant systems, structures, and equipment were analyzed. In order to analyze the high-frequency amplification factor, five sets of seismic time history were generated, which were matched with the uniform hazard response spectrum to reflect the characteristics of domestic earthquake motion. The nuclear power plant was subjected to seismic analysis for the construction of the Korean standard nuclear power plant, OPR1000, which is a reactor building, an auxiliary building assembly, a component cooling water heat exchanger building, and an essential service water building. Based on the results of the seismic analysis, a high-frequency amplification factor was derived upon the calculation of the floor response spectrum of the important locations of nuclear power plants. The high-frequency amplification factor can be effectively used for the seismic verification and seismic performance evaluation of electric equipment which are sensitive to high-frequency earthquakes.
An approximate analysis method is proposed to predict the dynamic amplification of shear forces in ordinary reinforced concrete shear walls as a preliminary study. First, a seismic design for three groups of ordinary reinforced concrete shear walls higher than 60 m was created on the basis of nonlinear dynamic analysis. Causes for the dynamic amplification effect of shear forces were investigated through a detailed evaluation of the nonlinear dynamic analysis result. A new modal combination rule was proposed on the basis of that observation, in which fundamental mode response and combined higher mode response were summed directly. The fundamental mode response was approximated by nonlinear static analysis result, while higher mode response was computed using response spectrum analysis for equivalent linear structural models with the effective stiffness based on the nonlinear dynamic analysis result. The proposed approximate analysis generally predicted vertical distribution of story shear and shear forces of individual walls from the nonlinear dynamic analysis with comparable accuracy.
For the important safety system, two or more units of identical equipment or redundant components with similar function were installed to prevent abnormal failure. If the failure probability of such equipment is independent, this redundancy could increase the system safety remarkably. However, if the failure of each component is highly correlated by installing in a structure or experiencing an earthquake event, the expected redundancy effect will decrease. Therefore, the seismic correlation of the equipment should be evaluated quantitatively for the seismic probabilistic safety assessment. The correlation effect can be explained in the procedure of constructing fragility curves. In this study, several methodologies to quantify the seismic correlation in the failure probability calculation for multiple components were reviewed and two possible ways considering the realistic situation were selected. Simple examples were tested to check the applicability of these methods. The conversion method between these two methods was suggested to render the evaluation using the advantages of each method possible.
The vibration control device such as the damper can be used to reinforce the seismic performance of structures. The damper is activated by the deformation of structures during earthquake; however, the deformation of structures is extremely small, causing difficulty in using the damper. Therefore, there is a need for a method capable of amplifying small deformities and transmitting them to the damper. The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate a displacement amplification seismic system using cable-pulley. The appropriate cable was selected through a cable tensile performance test and the results of the frame experiment were compared with theoretical displacement amplification ratio values. As a result, it may be said that the proposed system using cable-pulley is useful for displacement amplification.