IDENTIFICATION OF FREE-FIELD SOIL PROPERTIES USING NUPEC RECORDED GROUND MOTIONS

Over the past twenty years, the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation (NUPEC) of Japan has conducted a series of field model test programs to investigate various aspects of soil-structure interaction (SSI) effects on nuclear power plant structures, including embedment and dynamic structure-soil-structure interaction (SSSI) effects. As part of a collaborative agreement between the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and NUPEC, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) performed a numerical analysis to predict the free field soil profile using industry standard methods and the recorded free field responses to actual earthquake events. This paper describes the BNL free-field analyses, including the methods and the analysis results and their comparison to recorded data in the free field. The free-field soil profiles determined from the BNL analyses are being used for both the embedment and SSSI studies, the results of which will be made available upon their completion