Hydrodynamic effects on dynamic response of reactor vessel internals

Investigated in this paper is the effect on the dynamic responses of fluid/structure interaction between the components of reactor vessel internals due to their immersion in a confining fluid, A nonlinear mathematical model is developed for the dynamic analysis of the reactor vessel internals which includes lumped masses, stiffnesses and hydrodynamic couplings. The hydrodynamic mass matrix which characterizes the fluid/structure interaction is calculated. Also, the equations of motion containing the hydrodynamic mass matrix are presented. The responses of the reactor vessel internals due to seismic and pipe break excitations are obtained for the case with and without hydrodynamic couplings and the different response characteristics are discussed. Copyright (C) 1996 published by Elsevier Science Ltd.