Projection-based model order reduction for prestressed concrete with an application to the standard section of a nuclear containment building

Abstract

We propose a projection-based model order reduction procedure for the ageing of large prestressed concrete structures. Our work is motivated by applications in the nuclear industry, particularly in the simulation of containment buildings. Such numerical simulations involve a multi-modeling approach: a three-dimensional nonlinear thermo-hydro-visco-elastic rheological model is used for concrete; and prestressing cables are described by a one-dimensional linear thermo-elastic behavior. A kinematic linkage is performed in order to connect the concrete nodes and the steel nodes: coincident points in each material are assumed to have the same displacement. We develop an adaptive algorithm based on a Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) in time and greedy in parameter to build a reduced order model (ROM). The nonlinearity of the operator entails that the computational cost of the ROM assembly scales with the size of the high-fidelity model. We develop an hyper-reduction strategy based on empirical quadrature to bypass this computational bottleneck: our approach relies on the construction of a reduced mesh to speed up online assembly costs of the ROM. We provide numerical results for a standard section of a double-walled containment building using a qualified and broadly-used industrial grade finite element solver for structural mechanics (code$\_$aster).