Added mass effect for tip-over analysis of dry cask composite structures at two different scales

Safety of dry-cask storage structures, containing spent nuclear fuel, has always been an important concern for the nuclear industry. Detailed investigations of the mechanical response of these important composite structures due to hypothetical accident conditions have been the subject of many studies. In this paper, a tip-over induced impact of a dry cask is numerically analyzed at two different dimensional scales, i.e., a full-scale “prototype” and a 1/3-scale “model cask”. The latter is considered to study the accuracy of similitude laws because most experiments are done at the reduced scale. The added mass technique is applied to the model cask using the dynamic similitude concept in order to represent the behavior of the prototype cask. The effects of this added mass are also studied in terms of damage parameters, time histories of strains, stresses and accelerations to compare these two models. The results demonstrate that the added mass is able to predict the behavior of the model cask compared to that of the full-scale prototype.