Towards a complete framework for seismic analysis in Abaqus Available to Purchase

The nuclear industry currently employs a limited and ageing range of computational tools for seismic and soil–structure interaction analysis. This paper presents a set of new tools that have been developed for two and three-dimensional seismic analysis in Abaqus. The tools include a group of new elements that can be used to implement the free-field boundary method in Abaqus and a free-field mesh generator. Together with the existing capabilities of the program, these enhancements contribute to a general framework for more reliable and accurate seismic analysis. The paper also reports on the ongoing development of a new absorbing boundary condition that is more accurate than the standard viscous boundary. The theory of the boundary condition is derived. In its present form, the boundary condition is easy to implement in finite-element codes, both implicit and explicit. The boundary condition is exact for plane body waves arriving at an incident angle, which must be known a priori. As such, the method is suitable for problems that are characterised by a single seismic source on the surface of, or embedded within, a homogenous medium. However, it does not provide perfect absorption of surface waves or body waves arriving from multiple angles at the same time. Further research is required to extend the method to these types of problems.