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Seismic quantification of nonstructural components like electrical cabinets is essential to ensure the uninterrupted operation of nuclear facilities during earthquake events. This process requires experimental tests, which can be expensive, time-consuming, and limited by safety concerns and precision. As an alternative to that, numerical simulations should be done in such a way that they are capable of capturing the global dynamic behavior with minimum computational efforts. However, in the case of complex interconnected cabinets, the simplification of numerical models often poses difficulties in illustrating the real-time behavior of combined cabinet systems. On the other hand, detailed three-dimensional (3D) numerical models require lengthy time and sophisticated computational setup, indicating their expensive computational efforts. To resolve this issue, a simplified and efficient 3D modeling approach has been proposed in this study. The accuracy of the results from the new model showed an excellent match with that obtained from the responses of the experimental test. After the validation and observation of the numerical efficiency, a practical application is implemented by considering the impacts of earthquake frequency contents on the behavior of cabinet systems. From the outcomes, it is evident that this proposed modeling methodology has the potential to replace the complex combined nuclear cabinet models for earthquake evaluation.

In the case of nuclear power plants near end of their design life, a reassessment of the performance of safety-related equipment may be necessary to determine whether to shut down or extend the operation of the power plant. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the level of performance decline due to degradation. Electrical cabinets, including MCC and switchgear, are representative safety-related equipment. Several studies have assessed the degradation and seismic performance of nuclear power plant equipment. Most of those researches are limited to individual components due to the size of safety-related equipment and test equipment. However, only a few studies assessed the degradation performance of electrical cabinets. The equipment of various nuclear power plants is anchored to concrete foundations, and crack in concrete foundations is one of the most representative of degradation that could be visually confirmed. However, it is difficult to find a study for analysis through testing the effect of cracks in concrete foundations on the response of electrical cabinet internal equipment fixed by anchors. In this study, using a simple cabinet model considering cast-in-place anchor in uncracked and cracked concretes, a tri-axial shaking table tests were performed and the seismic behavior were observed.

This paper investigates the seismic behavior of an electrical cabinet considering the influence of equipment-anchor-interaction (EAI) that is generally not taken into consideration in a decoupled analysis. The hysteresis behavior of an anchor bolt in concrete was thereby considered to highlight this interaction effect. To this end, the experimental behavior of an anchor bolt under reversed cyclic loading was taken from the recently developed literature, and a numerical model for the anchor hysteresis was developed using the component approach. The hysteresis properties were then used to calibrate the multi-linear link element that is implemented as a boundary condition for the cabinet incorporating the EAI. To highlight this EAI further, the nonlinear time history analysis was performed for a cabinet considering the hysteresis behavior comparative to a fixed boundary condition. Additionally, the influence on the seismic fragility was evaluated for the operational and structural condition of the cabinet. The numerical analysis considering the anchor hysteresis manifests that the in-cabinet response spectra (ICRS) are significantly amplified with the corresponding reduction in the seismic capacity of 25% and 15% for an operational and structural safety condition under the selected protocols. Considering the fixed boundary condition over a realistic hysteresis behavior of the anchor bolt is more likely to overestimate the seismic capacity of the cabinet in a seismic qualification procedure.