SC Solutions’ Engineers, Dr. Asa Bassam, Dr. Julio Garcia, Ms. Natalie Doulgerakis, and Dr. Ben Kosbab participated in the Natural Phenomena Hazards (NPH) Meeting, co-sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), held October 23-24, 2018 at the NRC Headquarters in Rockville, MD. The meeting was focused on improving performance in NPH analysis and design for DOE and other critical facilities and brought together specialized experts from practitioners, regulators, facility owners, and academia.
Presentations from SC Solutions highlighted several important and varied topics. Dr. Bassam presented a case study for numerical modeling of pounding of two buildings during seismic events, and the effect of building impact on seismic demand for equipment housed in the impacting structures. Dr. Garcia presented a new approach to calculate a soil flexibility matrix using Green’s functions for ring and disk loads allowing the simulation of soil-pile-structure interaction problems – now implemented as an option in SC-SASSI software. Ms. Doulgerakis presented a case study for nonlinear time-domain fluid-soil-structure interaction analysis of a safety-class fire water storage tank for evaluation of the tank nozzle subjected to seismically-induced differential movements.
SC Solutions is grateful for the opportunity to share these experiences and lessons learned, and to further engage with the broader NPH community for continuing to solve challenging engineering problems with these complex and critical infrastructure facilities.
More information about the DOE-NRC Natural Phenomena Hazards (NPH) Meeting 2018 is available on the NRC website.