An assessment of support effect on reinforced concrete structure under inclined impact conditions

As an outer protective engineering structure for a nuclear power plant (NPP), a reinforced concrete (RC) containment wall of 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 plate structure subjected to projectile impact. In these studies, most of them focused on local damage of RC plate structures struck by a rigid projectile along the normal direction of the impact surface, while only few studies have focused on oblique impact. We have therefore conducted a series of impact tests under different impact conditions covering impact angles, stiffnesses of projectiles, etc. The objective is to figure out the different impact behaviors of the RC plate 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 plate were measured by using the load cells installed on the four corners of RC plate’s back surface. In the oblique impact, a special support structure was manufactured to fix the RC plate. 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 plate. Until now, static loading tests were carried out to confirm the stiffnesses of the components of supporting parts. This paper reports 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.