Research and Development of Three-Dimensional Isolation System for Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor: Part 2 — Details of Characteristics for Disc Springs and Oil Dampers on Basis of Full-Scale Loading Tests

Being compatible with the seismic and thermal loads for the large Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR), the three-dimensional isolation system is inevitable technology. The three-dimensional isolation system consists of the thick rubber bearings, the disc springs and the oil dampers. Since the isolation performances on the rubber bearings in the horizontal direction have been revealed by the previous studies [1], the vertical isolation performance and characteristics such as restoring force and damping performance should be clarified by loading tests to build the analytical model. This paper presents these fundamental vertical isolation characteristics obtained by loading tests with full-scaled disc springs and oil dampers. The disc springs as the vertical restoring forces have 700 mm in external diameter and 34 mm in thickness. The oil dampers have the maximum damping force of 2,000 kN at the velocity of 0.25 m/s. The disc spring is one of the largest size, and the oil damper is one of the largest damping capacity in Japan. The static loading tests such as incremental cyclic loadings under the supporting load were conducted to investigate the restoring force characteristics for the disc springs. The dynamic loading using sinusoidal waves with varied input frequencies or the seismic response waves obtained by seismic response analysis were conducted to investigate the damping performance for the oil dampers. The applicability of the design method and the analytical model for disc springs and oil dampers were demonstrated by the restoring force characteristics obtained from tests. It should be noted, this paper is in series from Part 1.