Improvement on optimal design of dynamic absorber for enhancing seismic performance of nuclear piping using adaptive Kriging method

For improving the seismic performance of the nuclear power plant (NPP) piping system, attempts have been made to apply a dynamic absorber (DA). However, the current piping DA design method is limited because it cannot provide the globally optimum values for the target design seismic loading. Therefore, this study proposes a seismic time history analysis-based DA optimal design method for piping. To this end, the Kriging approach is introduced to reduce the numerical cost required for seismic time history analyses. The appropriate design of the experiment method is used to increase the efficiency in securing response data. A gradient-based method is used to efficiently deal with the multi-dimensional unconstrained optimization problem of the DA optimal design. As a result, the proposed method showed an excellent response reduction effect in several responses compared to other optimal design methods. The proposed method showed that the average response reduction rate was about 9% less at the maximum acceleration, about 5% less at the maximum value of the response spectrum, about 9% less at the maximum relative displacement, and about 4% less at the maximum combined stress compared to existing optimal design methods. Therefore, the proposed method enables an effective optimal DA design method for mitigating seismic response in NPP piping in the future.