Earthquake response analysis of nuclear power plant buildings including nonlinear site effects

This paper gives the results of earthquake response analysis of nuclear power plant buildings with reactor VVER 440 in accordance with the methodology of seismic margin assessment and generic implementation procedure. Earthquake resisting of all the important buildings was considered taking a dynamic linear and nonlinear effects on soil-structures interaction into account. Limits of seismic resisting of building are expressed by high confidence low probability of failure. Impact contact between two structures is modeled by gap elements during the transient. The result of dynamic transient analyses with SASSI and ANSYS software was compared.