Buckling characteristics of the KALIMER-150 reactor vessel under lateral seismic loads and the experimental verification using reduced scale cylindrical shell structures

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the buckling characteristics of a conceptually designed KALIMER-150(Korea Advanced LIquid MEtal Reactor, 150MWe) reactor vessel and verify the buckling behavior using the reduced scale cylindrical shell structures. To do this, nonlinear buckling analyses using finite element method and evaluation formulae are carried out. From the results, the KALIMER-150 reactor vessel exhibits a dominant bending buckling mode and is significantly affected by the plastic behavior. The interaction effects with the vertical seismic load cause the lateral buckling load to be slightly decrease. From the results of the buckling experiments using reduced scaled cylindrical shell structures, it is verified that the buckling modes such as pure bending, pure shear, and mixed(bending plus shear) mode clearly appear under a lateral load corresponding to the slenderness ratio of cylinder