Influence of the aircraft crash induced local nonlinearities on the overall dynamic response of a RC structure through a parametric study

In the process of nuclear power plant design, the safety of structures is an important aspect. Civil engineering structures have to resist the accelerations induced by, for example, seismic loads or shaking loads resulting from the aircraft impact. This is even more important for the in-structures equipments that have also to be qualified against the vibrations generated by this kind of hazards. In the case of aircraft crash, as a large variety of scenarios has to be envisaged, it is necessary to use methods that are less CPU-time consuming and that consider appropriately the nonlinearities. The analysis presented in this paper deals with the problem of the characterization of nonlinearities (damaged area, transmitted force) in the response of a structure subjected to an aircraft impact. The purpose of our study is part of the development of a new decoupled nonlinear and elastic way for calculating the shaking of structures following an aircraft impact which could be very numerically costly if studied with classical finite element methods. The aim is to identify which parameters control the dimensions of the nonlinear zone and so will have a direct impact on the induced vibrations. In a design context, several load cases (and simulations) are analyzed in order to consider a wide range of impact (different loading surfaces, momentum) and data sets of the target (thickness, reinforcements). In this work, the nonlinear area generated by the impact is localized and studied through a para-metric analysis associated with an sensitivity analysis to identify the boundaries between the elastic domain and this nonlinear area.