IMPLEMENTING A STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM USING DIGITAL MODELS OF THE BAM LARGE DROP TEST FACILITY IN HORSTWALDE

At the Bundesanstalt fur Materialforschung und -prufung (BAM) full scale specimens for nuclear transport and storage containers (casks) are tested for their structural integrity in a series of drop tests on the Test Site Technical Safety in Horstwalde, 50 km south of Berlin. These drop tests cause a major stress not only on the casks, but also on the steel tower structure of the test facility, itself. The load pattern makes the structure very interesting for detailed investigation. The focus of the monitoring lies on the bolted joints of the flange connections that are a typical connection for cylindrical elements if welding is technical or economical unfavorable. The definition of the monitoring takes was done by investigating the existing documents and inspection results accompanied by building an initial digital representation of the structure, consisting of two finite element (FE) models and a geometrical 3D point cloud representation. As a first step the structures behavior during static and dynamic loading was analyzed using measurement data and an updated numerical FE Model. The idea behind is to use models for a digital planning and operation/evaluation of the structural health monitoring. A static FE simulation and a dynamic FE simulation are generated, to investigate how the structure behaves under the load conditions.