Statistical modelling of cracking in large concrete structures under Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical loads: Application to Nuclear Containment Buildings. Part 2: Sensitivity analysis

Stochastic finite elements analysis of large concrete structures’ serviceability under thermo-hydro-mechanical loads – Case of nuclear containment buildings

“…Basic and drying creep calculations are performed using the Burgers model [18]. The dependence of each viscoelastic component on the hydration rate is defined according to the maturity method [47][48] and the Arrhenius' law is used to describe thermo-activation aspects [49].…”

“…Finally, energetic and statistical size effects are accounted for using (a) a simplified '' Size Effect Law'' (SEL) relating the concrete's tensile strength ¨© to its effectively stressed volume derived from the weakest link theory in [55] and (b) stationary and spatially correlated RFs [56][57] associated with the spatial variability of the Young's modulus E. Full details and physical gains of the coupling of RFs and SELs are detailed in [18]. The main advantage consists of defining a FE spatially variable behaviour law both before and after strain localization and during the propagation phase which leads to a realistic random description of the cracking pattern.…”

“…That should cover chemothermal [7], hydric [8], viscoelastic [9][10] [11], size effect issues [12][13] and induced damage [14][15], hydraulic aspects [16] [17]. As a result, concrete structures' simulation involves a large set of physical models showing naturally epistemic uncertainty and a large number of parameters intrinsically scattered at various scales [18][16] [19]. Due to such complexity and uncertainty, the analytical derivation of those models cannot be achieved easily and the accurate prediction of concrete's local and global behaviours can only be done if uncertainties are included without altering the model's physical representativeness.…”

Numerical modelling of convection-driven cooling, deformation and fracturing of thermo-poroelastic media

“…For Ω h , the stress term in (17) and the diffusive fluxes in (19) and ( 20) are all discretised with a family of finite volume multi-point approximations termed MPxA [2,49,50]. The methods construct discrete representations of the constitutive relations, Hook's, Darcy's and Fourier's law, in terms of the cell centre variables.…”

“…Such coupled process-structure interaction is characteristic for a wide range of natural and engineered processes in natural and manufactured materials. For example, the structural and functional performance of concrete structures, like dams, bridges, nuclear and liquefied natural gas containers, and cement sheaths of subsurface well bore constructions, are affected by the time evolution of their properties under variable THM loads [5,14,44,18,19,45]. In the subsurface, THM processes interact with deformation and propagation of fractures in fluid injection operations [58,32,64].…”