Specialists from Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University have developed new approaches to the design of nuclear power plants. The methods, created with the support of the Priority-2030 program, make it possible to reduce construction costs without compromising reliability.
The Polytechnic team introduced modern finite element analysis methods into the design. It allows with high accuracy and computational efficiency to describe the multiphysical processes occurring in the reactor and related systems. Instead of rough approximations, detailed calculations are made that take into account the real behavior of structures.
Special attention is paid to assessing the strength under seismic and extreme impacts. The key point here is the correct modeling of the interaction of the structure with the soil base. The developers applied the method of synthesis of dynamic substructures: it "folds" the model from hundreds of thousands of elements into one "super element", while maintaining complete information about the behavior of the system. This speeds up calculations many times over without loss of accuracy.
Thanks to detailed modeling of wave processes in the soil, scientists have clarified the parameters of seismic impacts. The actual loads turned out to be more than two times lower than the values obtained by traditional regulatory methods. This opens up the possibility of optimizing structures, reducing material consumption and, as a result, reducing the final cost of construction.