Investigating the Effect of Supports on Reinforced Concrete Slab Subjected to Oblique Missile Impact

Abstract As an outer protective engineering structure for nuclear power plant (NPP), the reinforced concrete (RC) containment wall at NPP should be evaluated for safety requirement related to external threats. Therefore, much attention has been paid to investigate the impact resistance ability of the RC slab structure subjected to missile impact. In these studies, most of them focused on local damage of RC slab structures struck by a rigid missile along the normal direction of the impact surface, while only few studies have focused on oblique impact. So, we have conducted a series of impact tests under different impact conditions covering impact angles, stiffnesses of missiles and so on. The objective is to figure out the different impact behaviors of the RC slab structures. We also intended to put forward a numerical method based on the test results, and to validate the proposed method through comparisons between experimental and numerical results. In the test results, the reaction forces of RC slab were measured by using the load cells installed on the four corners of RC slab’s back surface. In the oblique impact, a special support structure was manufactured to fix the RC slab. It is speculated that the different supporting structure may influence the test results of reaction force. Thus, this work concentrates on the effect of the stiffnesses of the supports for oblique impact on the reaction forces of RC slab. Until now, static loading tests were carried out to confirm the stiffnesses of the components of supporting parts. The findings obtained from the comparison between the numerical results using the experimental values as spring constants in the finite element (FE) model and the reaction force measurement results will be reported.