Construction of Dynamic Model for Free Standing Spent Fuel Rack Under Seismic Excitations

<jats:p>Free standing rack designed for storing spent fuel at nuclear power station has an advantage to earthquake excitations because both fluid force and friction force can reduce the movement of a rack. However, there are various motions of FS rack such as parallel, rotational and rocking which should be taken into consideration when it is subjected to earthquake excitations. Therefore, the motion of FS rack must be precisely figured out in order to apply FS rack design concept. In this research, to investigate the motion of FS rack, 2-dimensional dynamic model considering pressure loss of gap flow was constructed. In addition, an experiment with a 1/16 scale model was conducted to validate the dynamic model. From numerical results based on the proposed dynamic model, some important features for the design of FS rack were found. Finally, case studies by real size free standing rack under the excitation of actually observed earthquake wave like The Great East Japan earthquake and The Niigata-ken Chuetsu-Oki earthquake were conducted based on the proposed method of calculation.</jats:p>