Influence of Differences Between Seismic Safety Evaluation Methods for Equipment and Piping of a Nuclear Facility

The objective of this research was to investigate the influence of differences between methods for evaluating the seismic safety of the equipment and piping of a nuclear facility. For the input ground motion, one wave was chosen from among 200 waves of input ground motions of maximum acceleration of 700–1100 cm/s2 created for the Oarai District of the Ibaraki Prefecture. Seismic safety evaluations were performed using the conventional method, which relies on floor response spectrum data, and using the multi-input method. The differences between the two methods were summarized. The target equipment and piping system were cooling systems in a model plant. It was found that the response predicted by the multi-input method was approximately half of the response predicted by the conventional method. The third trial evaluation method using the floor response of a three-dimensional building model as input was also reported.Copyright © 2015 by ASME