• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.9
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• pp.279-286
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• 2012

Recently, design of Universal Soft Controller(USC) has been applied to the advanced control room for nuclear power plant. USC is software-based manual control means to control safety components as well as non-safety components in the highly-integrated control room. Therefore, design feature of USC is essential for the implementation of a single workstation in the advanced control room. The traditional control room is replaced by computer-driven consolidated operator interfaces. Considering our design has further reduced the probability of USC spurious signals by requiring two distinct operator control actions to generate any control signal. The reality of USC does not increase the probability of reactor trip because the probability of spurious USC signal is negligible. Universal Soft Control represents a significant evolution in nuclear I&C/HSI System. USC integrates the indicators and controls from multiple divisions into a single integrated visual display unit(VDU) based HSI(Human System Interface). In order to prevent adverse influence on safety function performance from USC failure, ESFAS signals are applied to safety components or functions. In addition, safety manual switches have priority over USC's signals. Therefore, spurious USC signals can be momentarily blocked by selecting a soft control command from the safety VDU.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.173-180
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• 2017

In this study, air sampling locations in the stack of the Advanced Fuel Science Building (AFSB) at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) were assessed according to the ANSI/HPS N13.1-1999 specification. The velocity profile, flow angle and $10{\mu}m$ aerosol particle profile at the cross-section as functions of stack height L and stack diameter D (L/D) were assessed according to the sampling location criteria using COMSOL. The criteria for the velocity profile were found to be met at 5 L/D or more for the height, and the criteria for the average flow angle were met at all locations through this assessment. The criteria for the particle profile were met at 5 L/D and 9 L/D. However, the particle profile at the cross-section of each sampling location was found to be non-uniform. In order to establish uniformity of the particle profile, a static mixer and a perimeter ring were modeled, after which the degrees of effectiveness of these components were compared. Modeling using the static mixer indicated that the sampling locations that met the criteria for the particle profile were 5-10 L/D. When modeling using the perimeter ring, the sampling locations that met the criteria for particle profile were 5 L/D and 7-10 L/D. The criteria for the velocity profile and the average flow angle were also met at the sampling locations that met the criteria for the particle profile. The methodologies used in this study can also be applied during assessments of air sampling locations when monitoring stacks at new nuclear facilities as well as existing nuclear facilities.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.390-395
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• 2004

The iSTMS is a web-based integrated information system supporting Pre-Service and In-Service Inspection(PSI/ISI) processes for the nuclear power plants of KHNP(Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. Ltd.). The system provides a full spectrum coverage of the inspection processes from the planning stage to the final report of examination in accordance with applicable codes, standards, and regulatory requirements. The major functions of the system includes the inspection planning, examination, reporting, project control and status reporting, resource management as well as objects search and navigation. The system also provides two dimensional or three dimensional visualization interface to identify the location and geometry of components and weld areas subject to examination in collaboration with database applications. The iSIMS is implemented with commercial software packages such as database management system, 2-D and 3-D visualization tool, etc., which provide open, updated and verified foundations. This paper describes the key functions and the technologies for the implementation of the iSIMS.

• Journal of Platform Technology
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.52-62
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• 2021

Quality control is critical at manufacturing sites and is key to predicting the risk of quality defect before manufacturing. However, the reliability of manual quality control methods is affected by human and physical limitations because manufacturing processes vary across industries. These limitations become particularly obvious in domain areas with numerous manufacturing processes, such as the manufacture of major nuclear equipment. This study proposed a novel method for predicting the risk of quality defects by using natural language processing and machine learning. In this study, production data collected over 6 years at a factory that manufactures main equipment that is installed in nuclear power plants were used. In the preprocessing stage of text data, a mapping method was applied to the word dictionary so that domain knowledge could be appropriately reflected, and a hybrid algorithm, which combined n-gram, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, and Singular Value Decomposition, was constructed for sentence vectorization. Next, in the experiment to classify the risky processes resulting in poor quality, k-fold cross-validation was applied to categorize cases from Unigram to cumulative Trigram. Furthermore, for achieving objective experimental results, Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine were used as classification algorithms and the maximum accuracy and F1-score of 0.7685 and 0.8641, respectively, were achieved. Thus, the proposed method is effective. The performance of the proposed method were compared and with votes of field engineers, and the results revealed that the proposed method outperformed field engineers. Thus, the method can be implemented for quality control at manufacturing sites.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.400-414
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• 2021

Under high-level radioactive waste repository conditions, bentonite as an engineered barrier material undergoes thermal, hydrological, mechanical, and chemical processes. We report the applications of X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) imaging technique on the characterization and analysis of bentonite over the past decade to provide a reference of the utilization of this technique and the recent research trends. This overview of the X-ray CT technique applications includes the characterization of the bentonite either in pellets or powder form. X-ray imaging has provided a means to extract grain information at the microscale and identify crack networks responsible for the pellets' heterogeneity. Regarding samples of pellets-powder mixtures under hydration, X-ray CT allowed the identification and monitoring of heterogeneous zones throughout the test. Some results showed how zones with pellets only swell faster compared to others composed of pellets and powder. Moreover, the behavior of fissures between grains and bentonite matrix was observed to change under drying and hydrating conditions, tending to close during the former and open during the latter. The development of specializing software has allowed obtaining strain fields from a sequence of images. In more recent works, X-ray CT technique has served to estimate the dry density, water content, and particle displacement at different testing times. Also, when temperature was added to the hydration process of a sample, CT technology offered a way to observe localized and global density changes over time.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.569-578
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• 2016

The PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) has been widely used for the development of digital control system of nuclear power plant. The PLC has high maintenance costs and increasing complexity, hence, FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based digital control system has been considered as an alternative. However, the development of FPGA based digital control system is a challenge for PLC engineers because they are required to learn about new language to develop FPGA and knowledge and know-how acquired in the development of PLC is not transferable. In this study, we proposed and implemented an automatic translation tool for translation of FBD (Function Block Diagram), a programming language of PLC software, into VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language). Automatically translating the FBD to VHDL using this tool allows PLC engineers to develop FPGA without any knowledge of the hardware description language.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.39 no.11
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• pp.905-911
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• 2015

In this study, to examine the effect of a hole size change(smaller hole diameter) in the outer region of the lower-support-structure-bottom plate(LSSBP) on the reactor core-inlet flow-distribution, simulations were conducted with the commercial CFD software, ANSYS CFX R.15. The predicted results were compared with those of the original LSSBP. Through these comparisons, it was concluded that a more uniform distribution of the mass flow rate at the core-inlet plane could be obtained by reducing the hole size in the outer region of the LSSBP. Therefore, from the nuclear regulatory perspective, design change of the hole pattern in the outer region of the LSSBP may be desirable in terms of improving both the mechanical integrity of the fuel assembly and the core thermal margin.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.145-152
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• 2009

Currently almost all in-service-inspection techniques, applied in domestic nuclear power plants, are partial to field inspection technique. These kinds of techniques are related to managing nuclear power plants by the operation of foreign-produced inspection devices. There have been so many needsfor development of native in-service-inspection device because there is no native diagnosis device for nuclear power plant inspection yet in Korea. In this research, we developed several core techniques to make an automated ultrasonic pipe inspection system for nuclear power plants. A high performance multi-channel ultrasonic pulser/receiver module, an A/D converter module and a digital main CPU module were developed and the performance of the developed modules was verified. The S/N ratio, noise level and signal acquisition performance of the developed modules showed proper level as we designed in the beginning.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.9
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• pp.953-962
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• 2016

Model-based testing is a technique for performing the test by using a model that represents the behavior of the system as a system specification. Industrial domains such as automotive, military/aerospace, medical, railway and nuclear power generation require model-based testing and code coverage-based testing to improve the quality of software. Despite the fact that both model-based testing and code coverage-based testing are required, difficulty in achieving a high coverage using model-based testing caused by the abstraction level difference between the test model and the source code, results in the need for performing model-based testing separately. In this study, to overcome the limitations of the existing model-based testing, we proposed the state machine transformation method to effectively improve the code coverage using the protocol state machine, one of the typical modeling methods is used as the test model in model-based testing, as the test model. In addition, we performed a case study of both systems and analyzed the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.491-500
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• 2017

This paper investigates a low cost dual modular redundancy system based on heartbeat which can be applied to traffic control signal system. Failure of the traffic control signal system can cause traffic confusion and traffic accidents. Therefore safety and reliability of traffic control should be secured using fault tolerance technology. To do this, we configured a redundant board using the open source hardware and the heartbeat technique of Linux HA. The function of the traffic signal control system was verified and the fault recovery time was measured using fault injection test. As a result of the test, the fault recovery time was confirmed to be less than 9 seconds on average, confirming that the reliability target time is satisfied. Based on the results of this study, it is expected that it can be applied to fields requiring high reliability systems such as aviation, space, and nuclear power embedded systems.