Civil Engineering Association

Comparison of different Constitutive Models for Concrete in ABAQUS/Explicit for Missile Impact Analyses

The issue of missile impacts on concrete containment buildings (CCBs) of nuclear power plants (NPPs) was subject to intensive research for the first time in the 1970s and early 1980s. During that period a number of missile impact tests, even on a large scale have been carried out, most notably the Meppen Tests in Germany and the Tests at Sandia National Laboratory in the USA. In both tests soft and hard missiles were impacted on large reinforced concrete slabs resembling the CCBs of NPPs build at that time. In parallel quite a number of computational analyses have been performed to predict the results of these tests. For these analyses either empirical formulas or relatively coarse finite difference (FD) or finite element (FE) models even with load curves were used. Due to the limitations of these models the possibility to predict the outcome of missile impact tests was quite difficult. Today quite a number of advanced computational methods and methodologies are available for impact analyses and as a result the issue of missile impact testing has reached a significant level of interest inside the nuclear community again.