Variation of non-linear response of reactor building considering uncertainties of dynamic properties

Study on advanced seismic design for LWR has been carried out by the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation (NUPEC), under the sponsorship of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) of Japan. Recently, a lot of efforts to estimate the safety integrity of a reactor building have been made by many researchers. When we evaluate the safety integrity, it is important to estimate the variation of the seismic response that is associated with the uncertainties of the dynamic properties. The object of this study is to evaluate the variation of non-linear seismic response of the reactor buildings. In this study, several non-linear variation analyses are carried out on two typical types (BWR type and PWR type) of reactor buildings in Japan, focusing on two points. One is to use statistical data based on laboratory tests and field tests to simulate the real phenomena and second is to deal with the maximum variation of the non-linear response nearby the second yield point of the tri-linear restoring force curve