Seismic hazard mitigation for nuclear power plant

The seismic safety of nuclear power plan(tNPP)has always been a major consideration in the site selection,design,operation,and more recently recertification of existing installations. In addition to the actual NPP and all their operational and safety related support systems,the storage of spent fuel in temporary or permanent storage facilities also poses a seismic risk. This seismic risk is typically assessed with state-of-the-art modeling and analytical tools that capture everything from the ground rupture or source of the earthquake to the site specific ground shaking,taking geotechnical parameters and soilfoundationstructureinteraction (SFSI) into account to the non-linear structural response of the reactor core,the containment structure,the core cooling system and the emergency cooling system(s),to support systems,piping systems and non-structural components,and finally the performance of spent fuel storage in the probabilistically determined operational basis earthquake (OBE) or the safe shutdown earthquake (SSE) scenario. The best and most meaningful validation and verification of these advanced analytical tools is in the form of full or very large scale experimental testing,designed and conducted in direct support of model and analysis tool calibration. This paper outlines the principles under which such calibration testing should be conducted and illustrates with examples the kind of testing and parameter evaluation required.

Effect of a filter cake on shear behavior of sand-concrete pile interface

A filter cake is often formed between soil and concrete during casting concrete in the ground,such as constructions of diaphragm walls and bored piles.The present study aims to investigate the effect of the filter cake on the shear behavior of the sand-concrete pile interface.A series of sand-concrete interface direct shear tests were performed with a large-direct shear apparatus while considering different roughness(I=0,10,20 and 30 mm)and filter cake thickness(Δh=0,5 and 10 mm).For a smooth interface without a filter cake,the shear stress-horizontal displacement curves showed a“softening”response.The peak shear strength and friction angle decreased exponentially with increasing theΔh.Whereas,for a rough interface withΔh=5 or 10 mm,the shear stress-horizontal displacement curves presented a“hardening”response.The peak strength,as well as friction angle,decreased linearly with increasing theΔh.Moreover,a critical roughness I_(cr)of 10 mm was observed in the tests without a filter cake.The interface shear strength initially increased with increasing I but gradually decreased when the I exceeded I_(cr).In addition,the filter cake could reduce the roughness sensitivity on shear strength.

Deterministic Circular Self Test Path

Circular self test path (CSTP) is an attractive technique for testing digital integrated circuits(IC) in the nanometer era, because it can easily provide at-speed test with small test data volume and short test application time. However, CSTP cannot reliably attain high fault coverage because of difficulty of testing random-pattern-resistant faults. This paper presents a deterministic CSTP (DCSTP) structure that consists of a DCSTP chain and jumping logic, to attain high fault coverage with low area overhead. Experimental re- sults on ISCAS’89 benchmarks show that 100% fault coverage can be obtained with low area overhead and CPU time, especially for large circuits.