Safety assessment of Generation Ⅲ nuclear power plant buildings subjected to commercial aircraft crash Part I: FE model establishment and validations

Abstract

Investigations of the commercial aircraft impact effect on nuclear island infrastructures have been drawing extensive attention, and this paper aims to perform the safety assessment of Generation Ⅲ nuclear power plant (NPP) buildings subjected to typical commercial aircrafts crash. At present Part I, finite element (FE) models establishment and validations for both the aircrafts and NPP buildings are performed. (i) Airbus A320 and A380 aircrafts are selected as the representative medium and large commercial aircrafts, and the corresponding fine FE models including the skin, beam, fuel and etc. are established. By comparing the numerically derived impact force time-histories with the existing published literatures, the rationality of aircrafts models is verified. (ii) Fine FE model of the Chinese Zhejiang Sanao NPP buildings is established, including the detailed structures and reinforcing arrangement of both the containment and auxiliary buildings. (iii) By numerically reproducing the existing 1/7.5 scaled aircraft model impact tests on steel plate reinforced concrete (SC) panels and assessing the impact process and velocity time-history of aircraft model, as well as the damage and the maximum deflection of SC panels, the applicability of the existing three concrete constitutive models (i.e., K&C, Winfrith and CSC) are evaluated and the superiority of Winfrith model for SC panels under deformable missile impact is verified. The present work can provide beneficial reference for the integral aircraft crash analyses and structural damage assessment in the following two parts of this paper. Keywords: Safety assessment, Nuclear power plant, Aircraft, Numerical simulation, Finite element