ASSESSMENT OF THE RELEVANCE OF DISPLACEMENT BASED DESIGN METHODS/CRITERIA TO NUCLEAR PLANT STRUCTURES

Revisions to the USNRC Regulatory Guides and Standard Review Plan Sections devoted to earthquake engineering practice are currently in process. The intent is to reflect changes in engineering practice that have evolved in the twenty years that have passed since those criteria were originally published. Additionally, field observations of the effects of the Northridge (1994) and Kobe (1995) earthquakes have inspired some reassessment in the technical community about certain aspects of design practice. In particular, questions have arisen about the effectiveness of basing earthquake resistant designs on resistance to seismic forces and, then evaluating tolerability of the expected displacements. Therefore, a research effort was undertaken to examine the implications for NRC's seismic practice of the move, in the earthquake engineering community, toward using expected displacement rather than force (or stress) as the basis for assessing design adequacy. The results of the NRC sponsored research on this subject are reported in this paper. A slow trend toward the utilization of displacement based methods for design was noted. However, there is a more rapid trend toward the use of displacement based methods for seismic evaluation of existing facilities. A document known as FEMA 273, has been developed and is being used as the basis for the design of modifications to enhance the seismic capability of existing non-nuclear facilities. The research concluded that displacement based methods, such as given in FEMA 273, may be useful for seismic margin studies of existing nuclear power stations. They are unlikely to be useful for the basic design of new stations since nuclear power stations are designed to remain elastic during a seismic event. They could, however, be useful for estimating the margins associated with that design