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Abstract
This paper presents the three-dimensional finite element seismic response analysis of full-scale boiling water reactor BWR5 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station subjected to the Niigata-ken Chuetsu-Oki earthquake that occurred on 16 July 2007. During the earthquake, the automatic shutdown system of the reactors was activated successfully. Although the monitored seismic acceleration significantly exceeded the design level, it was found that there were no significant damages of the reactor cores or other important systems, structures and components through in-depth investigation. In the seismic design commonly used in Japan, a lumped mass model is employed to evaluate the seismic response of structures and components. Although the lumped mass model has worked well so far for a seismic proof design, it is still needed to develop more precise methods for the visual understanding of response behaviors. In the present study, we propose the three-dimensional finite element seismic response analysis of the full-scale and precise BWR model in order to directly visualize its dynamic behaviors. Through the comparison between both analysis results, we discuss the characteristics of both models. The stress values were also found to be generally under the design value.
Acknowledgements
Our work was conducted cooperatively with a team consisting of many engineers and researchers. The authors would like to thank Kenji Murano, Kazuyuki Nagasawa, Masashi Fukushima, Takehiro Oku, Yoshio Takagi and Ai Watanabe (Tokyo Electric Power Company); Masaaki Tanaka, Yuichi Sawahata and Minoru Otaka (Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy); Tetsuya Wada, Takayuki Hayashi, Kunizo Onda, Yoshikazu Katai and Koji Nishimoto (Allied Engineering Corporation); and Shin-ichiro Sugimoto and Hiroshi Kawai (The University of Tokyo) for their efforts.