NHERI SimCenter 12/13 Webinar Announcement

[announce at designsafe-ci.org]

Dear Colleagues,
Please share this announcement of an upcoming webinar on Wednesday December
13, 11am - noon (PST). The Early Career Researcher Forum is a webinar
series that highlights compelling research and facilitates the exchange of
ideas among graduate students, postdocs and early career faculty, but all
are welcome to participate.

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NHERI SimCenter – Early Career Researcher Forum
Wednesday, December 13, 2017, 11 - 12pm (PST)

*HPC Aided Seismic Risk Assessment of Vertical Concrete Dry Casks*

*Presenter:*
Majid Ebad Sichani is a PhD Candidate in the Civil and Environmental
Engineering Department at Rice University. He obtained his Bachelor’s
degree from Isfahan University of Technology in 2009 and his Master’s
degree from University of Tehran in 2012, both in Structural Engineering
and in his home country, Iran. Since starting his PhD program at Rice
University in 2013, he has been studying the seismic risk to concrete dry
casks structures, used for the storage of spent nuclear fuel.

*REGISTER for this webinar at*

https://www.designsafe-ci.org/learning-center/training/
simcenter/webinar-171213/
Connection information will be distributed upon receipt of registration.

*Abstract:*

Dry casks are vertical reinforced concrete cylinders, which are used for
the interim storage of spent nuclear fuel. The casks are freestanding
structures and thus vulnerable to large horizontal displacements and/or
rocking motions when subjected to seismic loads. Collision between adjacent
casks or tip-over might occur due to excessive seismically-induced
displacements, potentially leading to structural damage and release of
radioactive material. In order to estimate the seismic risk to the vertical
dry casks, the response of the structure to seismic loads and associated
impact scenarios needs to be studied. Among various tasks required for the
risk analysis, the focus of this talk is on the cask structural response to
the seismic and tip-over loads and the associated numerical simulation of
the problems in a commercial finite element program.

Virtual experiments are designed in both tasks by generating different
cask-pad-soil configurations across typical ranges of structural,
geometric, and material properties. Nonlinear time history response of the
generated configurations subjected to seismic/impact loads is obtained by
using validated 3D finite element models, and key structural responses are
estimated. Employing stepwise regression, probabilistic seismic demand
models are proposed for the maximum horizontal displacement and maximum
rocking angle of the casks subjected to seismic loads, and metamodels are
developed to predict the maximum strain of the canister and maximum
acceleration of the concrete overpack in the tip-over scenario. The
resulting probabilistic models are used in fragility and risk analyses, and
the annual probability of large seismically-induced motions is evaluated
for different locations in the United States. Similarly, the probability of
the dry cask failure in a tip-over event is estimated, and recommendations
regarding the design of vertical concrete dry casks are provided. Finally,
the risk analysis results from the mentioned tasks are combined to estimate
the overall tip-over failure probability, and ongoing/future work is
mentioned briefly.

This study employs the cloud approach for the fragility and risk analysis,
which typically requires significant number of numerical simulations. The
talk demonstrates how HPC facilitates development and analysis of the
numerical models, and how the NHERI’s DesignSafe cyber infrastructure and
similar facility can be utilized to efficiently enable such studies.
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