Failure pressure analysis of a nuclear reactor prestressed concrete containment building

•Failure pressure of a nuclear reactor containment building.•Non-linear analysis of composite materials.•Reactor containment building study by means of the Serial-Parallel Rule of Mixtures.•Rheology in the tendon system for a 40-year study.•Comparison with previous research for the current structure. The failure analysis of an existing and operational nuclear power plant reactor containment building subjected to an accident internal pressure is studied in this paper. The computation is based on the Finite Element Method and on the Serial-Parallel Rule of Mixtures. Using these techniques, the effect of all the existing materials in the structure is considered and information for each of them is obtained as an output. The failure mechanism in the structure is defined through strain thresholds that cannot be exceeded at any point of the structure for the containment component materials. The strains of the materials are checked over the whole computational process identifying thus the failure pressure and the critical points. The results are compared with the ones obtained in previous work for the same structure (Barbat et al., 1998).