ABSTRACT

In major industrial buildings, such as nuclear power plants, as with other common constructions such as high rise buildings, it is impractical to perform a coupled dynamic analysis of the primary system (building) and the secondary system (HVAC, piping, equipment, etc.) using the conventional analytical tools. The stiffness and inertia properties of the two systems may be quite dissimilar, which is likely to cause numerical problems in a coupled analysis. For other practical reasons also, it is customary to perform seismic analysis of the two systems separately. The effect of decoupling on the primary system is presented in Chapter 7. We shall discuss in this Chapter the problems associated with the decoupled response of secondary systems, and the techniques by which the accurate response of a secondary system can be calculated.