A flexible various-scale approach for soil-structure interaction and its application in seismic damage analysis of the underground structure of nuclear power plants

In simulations of geotechnical engineering, interface elements are versatile tools and are widely used in the modeling of the relative displacements between soils and structures. To consider the case of a local failure adjacent to a soil-structure interaction region, a partial mesh refinement should be performed. In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) interface element with an arbitrary number of nodes is developed as a new technique to reduce the complexity and difficulty of managing the various scales between soil and structure. An asymmetric number of nodes is permissible on the two sliding surfaces. In this manner, soil and structure can be discretized independently, and the various-scale model is established conveniently and rapidly. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical examples. The various-scale approach is employed in an elasto-plastic seismic damage analysis of a buried concrete drainage culvert of a nuclear power plant. The results indicate that by applying the proposed method, the number of elements decreased by 72.5%, and the computational efficiency improved by 59% with little influence on accuracy. The proposed method is powerful for local damage evolution analyses of both soil and structure and possesses great practical significance and the potential for further application, especially for nonlinear analysis of large-scale geotechnical engineering.