Aging, Shaking and Cracking of Infrastructures: Dams and Nuclear Containment Vessels
Event details
| Date | 10.11.2011 |
| Hour | 12:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Victor Saouma |
| Location |
GC C330
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
When major concrete structures such as dams or nuclear reactors are aging (usually due to chemically induced volumetric expansion such as AAR) or are rattled by earthquakes most often major cracks occur and jeopardize their structural integrity. Structural assessment of critical and complex infrastructures is far more complex than the linear elastic analysis associated with their design. Full static or transient nonlinear analyses must be undertaken. Such an analysis must be rooted in solid theoretical models. This talk will draw exclusively from the speaker’s personal experiences and will address the finite element modeling of concrete dams and nuclear reactor containment vessels. The path from testing to model to implementation to assessment and finally to application will be highlighted. It will be shown that nonlinear analysis can be used to perform a structural safety assessment of critical infrastructures in lieu of simplistic (and possibly riskier or more expensive) alternate solutions. Short Bio: Victor Saouma is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. His research activity on dynamic analysis of dams has been funded for nine years by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) on AAR by the Swiss Federal Office of Geology and Water. Most recently he was a consultant to explain the root cause for the delamination of a nuclear containment vessel. Prof. Saouma is President elect of IFraMCoS and a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel on concrete structure deterioration.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Prof. Eugen Brühwiler