• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.19 no.1 s.71
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• pp.93-103
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• 2006

It is absolutely essential that safety assessment of the containment buildings during service life because containment buildings are last barrier to protect radioactive substance due to the accidents. Therefore, this study describes an enhanced degenerated shell finite element(FE) which has been developed for nonlinear FE analysis of reinforced concrete(RC) containment buildings with elasto-plastic material model. For the purpose of the material nonlinear analysis, Drucker-Prager failure criteria is adapted in compression region and material parameters which determine the shape of the failure envelop are derived from biaxial stress tests. Reissner-Mindlin(RM) assumptions are adopted to develop the degenerated shell FE so that transverse shear deformation effects is considered. However, it is found that there are serious defects such as locking phenomena in RM degenerated shell FE since the stiffness matrix has been overestimated in some situations. Therefore, shell formulation is provided in this paper with emphasis on the terms related to the stiffness matrix based on assumed strain method. Finally, the performance of the present shell element to analysis RC containment buildings is tested and demonstrated with several numerical examples. From the numerical tests, the present results show a good agreement with experimental data or other numerical results.