Construction of Vibration Table in an Extended World for Safety Assessment of Nuclear Power Plants

Computational issues of the seismic simulation of nuclear power plants are discussed in this chapter. The safety requirement of nuclear power plant is high enough to conduct real experiments to evaluate the structural integrity of mechanical components. However, such experiments are performed on independent sets of components because the ability of experimental facilities is limited. Hence, we are constructing a vibration table in an extended world for simulation. In our vibration table, the balancing domain decomposition method is adopted to reduce the computation cost of large mechanical components. Because the computation cost of balancing domain decomposition method depends much on the number of subdomains, a prediction methodology of optimal number of subdomains is introduced. Numerical validation is performed with a component of an actual nuclear power plant.