Research
New Horizon 2020 project launched to develop an advanced approach for Seismic Risk Assessment of Nuclear Power Plants
29th September 2020: The METHODS AND TOOLS INNOVATIONS FOR SEISMIC RISK ASSESSMENT (METIS) H2020 Project has been officially launched opening a promising research collaboration to improve confidence in nuclear safety by advancing the approach utilised for seismic safety assessments for Nuclear Power Plants. METIS is an EU-funded 4-year project under the Horizon 2020 EURATOM Programme for Research and Innovation having a total budget of €5 million, of which €4 million is funded from the European Commission. The project will be delivered by an international consortium gathering 13 European partners from France, Germany, Italy, Greece, UK, Ukraine and Slovenia alongside with 3 organisations from US and Japan. The consortium had a virtual kick off meeting held over two days 29th-30th September 2020 attended by 78 participants. The first day was the plenary session which outlined all the Work Packages’ (WP) and on the second day, there was a WP coordination session for more detailed discussion.
Contact person from our institute for this project is Konstantin Goldschmidt
For further information contact: Emma.Luguterah(at)edfenergy.com or 0208 935 2714
Further development of analysis methods for the simulation of damage in reinforced concrete structures due to impact loads
Dynamic shock and impact loads represent exceptional loads and therefore a major challenge in the design and dimensioning of structures. The scenarios range from impact loads caused by vehicles or airplanes, falling loads such as crane loads or rocks/debris, to scenarios caused by military projectiles such as shaped charges, explosive charges, large and small caliber ammunition and hyper velocity impacts, to name just a few categories. The projectiles in such an impact scenario can be roughly categorized as hard, semi-hard or soft. They cause both local and global damage to the structure. In terms of holistic loading situations such as an aircraft crash, the local damage mechanisms are usually associated with the impact of hard aircraft components such as the engine shaft. In the case of such a hard impact, the projectile and structural reactions are strongly coupled and the quantification of the dynamic load-bearing capacity of reinforced concrete is a major challenge.
Development of a realistic design concept for the “out-of-plane” load-bearing capacity of unreinforced masonry walls to reduce conservatism
Masonry has very good properties for vertical load transfer, but can only absorb horizontal loads to a limited extent, especially transverse to the plane (out-of-plane, slab shear). Loads transverse to the plane are caused by wind, explosion or earthquakes.
Particular attention must be paid to earthquake excitation. The vibration behavior of the building and the mass inertia of the walls result in actions perpendicular to the wall plane that must be absorbed by the walls without failure occurring. Since the introduction of the earthquake standard (DIN 4149) in 2005 and its inclusion in the list of technical building regulations, earthquake verifications have been mandatory in many regions of Germany. The load-bearing capacity of load-bearing and non-load-bearing masonry must also be guaranteed under earthquake loads.
Contact person
Helm - TU Kaiserslautern (uni-kl.de)
mehr
Earthquake engineering
Research topics:
- Seismic design principles and hazard analyses, risk-based load assumptions, deconvolution calculations (site response analysis), spectrum-compatible artificial earthquake time histories
- Innovative methods for designing and upgrading for earthquakes (structural engineering and plant engineering)
- Seismic base isolation: concepts and bearings
- Anti-seismic devices (dampers, bearings, active and passive systems, etc.)
- Dynamic soil-structure interaction (SSI), pile foundations with pile-soil-pile interaction
- Experimental investigations (dynamic component tests, shaking table tests, plant engineering)
Soil-structure interaction
The 16th D-A-CH Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics took place in Innsbruck on September 26 and 27, 2019.
The Department of Statics and Dynamics of Structures participated in the event with the following technical paper:
“Nicht-lineare Untersuchungen zur dynamischen Boden-Bauwerk-lnteraktion”
The soil-structure interaction has a significant influence on the dynamic behavior of a structure during an earthquake. In this paper, various methods were examined with regard to the numerical effort of coupled simulations for the non-linear analysis of soil and structure.
more informations:
D-A-CH_Mitteilungsblatt_2020_1.pdf (s. Seite 2-7)
A. Feldbusch, H. Sadegh-Azar
Structural dynamics (incl. experimental structural dynamics)
Research topics:
- Structural monitoring and system identification
- Vibration and shock measurements, vibration forecasts for impacts from traffic, machinery, blasting, etc. and human-induced vibrations
- Aircraft crash load case, projectile and debris impacts, impact loads and shock loads
- Machine foundations (e.g. turbine tables), pile foundations
- Explosion loads, detonation and deflagration (determination and design)
- Weapon effects (including terror) and shelter construction
- Experimental dynamic investigations (component tests and plant engineering)
Services Fachgebiet Statik / Dynamik
Explosion, blast and ballistic loads on buildings
Fields of work:
- Explosion load case: Detonation and deflagration
- Determination of explosion loads and explosion pressure waves
- Simulations/investigations on the propagation of the blast wave, reflections
- Dynamic stability tests for explosion loads
- Explosion protection and innovative materials
- Weapon effects and shelter construction
Probabilistic investigations and risk studies
Research topics:
- Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA)
- Probabilistic load and bearing capacity investigations
- Probabilistic safety concepts
- Probabilistic safety analyses (PSA)
- Structural reliability, reliability analysis
- Seismic Margin Assessments (SMA) and fragility analyses
- Risk investigations and evaluations
Innovative materials and support structures
Research topics:
- Material and system development
- Innovative adaptive and intelligent materials (e.g. dielectric elastomers, adaptive vibration absorbers, active and passive vibration dampers, bearings and systems for basic insulation)
- Innovative materials and systems for protection against extraordinary impacts (e.g. shock, impact and explosion loads, airplane crashes) including damper concrete, DUCON ®, steel fiber concrete, composite systems)
- Material modeling and programming, implementation of FEM
- Membrane and cable structures
HiPerCon - High Performance Composite Constructions
Composite structures offer high performance with minimized material usage thanks to the material-specific use of the materials used. This field of research has been pursued at the TU Kaiserslautern for several decades. In the HiPerCon research focus area, the research field is now being expanded, starting with load-bearing capacity, in order to develop high-performance multifunctional components. Typical additional functionalities include the targeted use of resource-optimized materials as well as fire protection and building physics properties.
Research topics:
- Material-appropriate application of high-performance concretes and new building materials
- New construction methods and new composite and fastening materials in composite components
- Optimization of the material properties of individual components
Static and dynamic simulation (incl. program and software development)
- Numerical simulations, finite element method (FEM)
- Dynamic simulations in the time domain (implicit and explicit) and in the frequency domain
- Boundary element method, discrete element method, thin layer method, etc.
Landesforschungszentrum uni-kl.de/cmcm/
