Nuclear Power Plant Disaster Site Simulation Using Rigid Body Physics

Abstract

Nuclear power plant disasters in the past century have led to the major economic loss, negative environmental impact, and danger to human lives. Disaster relief operations such as search and rescue, hazard detection, and damage assessment face significant challenges due to the difficulty in categorizing and analyzing damaged building structures. This study proposes an efficient method to generate a large number of 3D geometric models of a post-disaster nuclear power plant site using the Bullet physics engine. Two scenarios of nuclear power plant disasters, which are explosions due to reactor failure as well as earthquakes, are considered in this study. Different degrees of virtual forces are applied to the nuclear power plant site, and the resulting geometry of damaged structures are recorded. The generated database of damaged structures has many potential applications in object recognition, risk classification, and hazard analysis. © 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.