A personal computer code for seismic evaluations of nuclear power plant facilities

A wide range of computer programs and modeling approaches are often used to justify the safety of nuclear power plants. It is often difficult to assess the validity and accuracy of the results submitted by various utilities without developing comparable computer solutions. Taken this into consideration, CARES is designed as an integrated computational system which can perform rapid evaluations of structural behavior and examine capability of nuclear power plant facilities, thus CARES may be used by the NRC to determine the validity and accuracy of analysis methodologies employed for structural safety evaluations of nuclear power plants. CARES has been designed to: operate on a PC, have user friendly input/output interface, and have quick turnaround. The CARES program is structured in a modular format. Each module performs a specific type of analysis. The basic modules of the system are associated with capabilities for static, seismic and nonlinear analyses. This paper describes the various features which have been implemented into the Seismic Module of CARES version 1.0. In Section 2 a description of the Seismic Module is provided. The methodologies and computational procedures thus far implemented into the Seismic Module are described in Section 3. Finally, a complete demonstration of the computational capability of CARES in a typical soil-structure interaction analysis is given in Section 4 and conclusions are presented in Section 5. 5 refs., 4 figs