Seismic fragility analysis of nuclear power plants considering structural parameter uncertainty

•Propose a new method for seismic fragility analysis of nuclear power plants (NPPs) with uncertainty.•Verify the accuracy, efficiency and applicability of the proposed approach.•Analyze the seismic fragility of NPPs with uncertain structural parameters.•Analyze the influence of the parameters’ uncertainty using sensitivity analysis. This paper proposes a new method for seismic fragility analysis of nuclear power plants (NPPs) considering the uncertainty sources of both ground motions and structural parameters. Based on the conventional seismic fragility model that only contains the uncertainty of ground motions, seismic fragility analysis conditioned on a specific seismic intensity is probabilistically reformulated by further incorporating the uncertainty of structural parameters. To improve the efficiency of the analysis, a point estimation-assisted incremental dynamic analysis was developed for evaluating the seismic fragility model including the uncertainty of structural parameter. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method were demonstrated by a single-degree-of-freedom system, where Monte Carlo simulation method is used for comparison. The seismic fragility based on the finite element model of an AP1000 NPP was analyzed using the proposed method. The results reveal that the safety of NPP structure would be overestimated without considering the uncertainty of structural parameter and the influence of the uncertainty of structural parameters on the seismic fragility of NPP presents an upward trend as the damage level increases. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis of different structural parameters reveals that elastic module may have a dominant influence.