Concluding the chapter, the author should like to give some practical examples. One of recently built NPPs was analyzed for different soil and excitation models. Let us look at the acceleration response spectra on the elevation +21.5 m.
The first comparison is for rigid soil and flexible soil (without embedment). As we remember, rigid soil means the absence of the SSI effects. Flexible soil in this case was of medium type. Structure was one of the NPP buildings. One and the same three-component seismic excitation (corresponding to the standard spectra described in RG1.60) was applied to the surface of the rigid and flexible soil. In the first case this very motion became the response motion of the base mat; in the second case, the response motion of the base mat was modified by the SSI effects. The comparison of the floor response spectra (enveloped over 8 corner nodes of the floor slab, smoothed and broadened 15% each side in the frequency range) at the structural level +21.5 m is shown in Fig. 14.
We see the considerable difference in the spectral shape: SSI effects form the main spectral peak, but for high frequency range (here – after 5 Hz) spectral accelerations with SSI are less than without SSI. As to the maximal accelerations (we see them in the right part of the spectral curves), SSI effects may decrease them (see Fig.14b) or not. It sometimes depends on the height of the floor considered.
The second comparison is for surface and embedded base mats. Site-specific threecomponent seismic excitation is applied at the free surface of two flexible soil foundations:
first, real soil foundation; second, the same soil foundation without upper 10.4 meters of soil (corresponding to the embedment depth of the structure). The comparison of the response spectra is shown in Fig.15 in the same format as in Fig.14. We see that the embedment considerably impacts the first spectral peaks, decreasing spectral accelerations. The physical reason is that the mass of the outcropped soil for the embedded basement in fact is subtracted from the mass of the basement when inertial loads are developed for the platform model of inertial interaction in the moving coordinate system placed on the platform.
