NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF THE ULTIMATE LOAD-CAPACITY OF A REACTOR CONTAINMENT BUILDING

From the 1980's onwards, specific requirements of standard guidelines related to failure analysis have made it necessary to extensively appl y nonlinear numerical models for containment safety assessment. In the same period new structure types have been proposed which reveal high sensitivities to load cases reproducing accident conditions. This pape r presents the results of preliminary non linear calculations on simpl ified models. The results point out how load conditions with different contribution of temperature loads respect to pressure can lead to lar ge variations in failure mechanisms and limit load factors. This uncer tainty is related to the poor definition of accident scenarios and str esses the need for seeking a general agreement on simulation criteria to be used in safety evaluations in order to obtain fully understandab le and comparable results.