Fukushima “I" nuclear accident (Japan 2011) has drawn attention to the issue of gas leakage from hazardous facilities through building boundaries, even if that facility was designed in order to prevent undesirable gas leakage from the building under the non-conventional operating conditions. In other words and as an example, the ventilation system for many types of hazardous facilities buildings, such as aerospace Hydrogen-facilities, provides a negative pressure gradient relative to their outside ambient atmospheric pressure. However, if an event such as an earthquake beyond the normal design basis occurs, both the shear wall structure and the facility itself may be damaged. Also, normal or extreme wind loading on the building will result in regions where the external pressure is less than the internal pressure, which may allow air leakage out of the structure. From the foregoing semantics, the idea of this paper has come, to locate the hazardous facilities underground where possible, with developing their boundaries to perform as potential gas insulation.
The paper aims at developing a combination of soil and Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls (RCSW's) to perform as effective-potential gas insulation for underground aerospace facilities. It involves the configurations and procedures that were used in experimental verification tests to measure gas permeability of the proposed Soil-RCSW's Combination.