• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제38권1호
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• pp.11-32
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• 2006

System thermal-hydraulic codes have been used in the past decades in the areas of design, operation, licensing and safety of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). The development and validation of these codes have reached a high degree of maturity, through the consideration of huge experiments and advanced numerical models. Nowadays, the analyses are based upon realistic approaches rather than the conservative evaluation models. However the applications of these computational tools require preliminary qualification issues. Although huge amounts of financial and human resources have been invested for the development and improvement of codes, the calculation results are still affected by errors. In the sophisticated nuclear technology, design and safety of NPP, these errors must be quantified. An overview of the state of the art of the current thermal-hydraulic system code is developed and the need of uncertainty analysis in code calculations is emphasized. Several sources of uncertainty have been classified and commented, and typical applications of such methods are shown.

• 한국수소및신에너지학회논문집
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• 제19권3호
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• pp.239-247
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• 2008

Hydrogen production facility using very high temperature gas cooled reactor lies in situation of high temperature and corrosion which makes hydrogen release easily. In that case of hydrogen release, there lies a danger of explosion. However, from the point of thermal-hydraulics view, the long distance of them makes lower efficiency result. In this study, therefore, outlines of hydrogen production using nuclear energy are researched. Several methods for analyzing the effects of hydrogen explosion upon high temperature gas cooled reactor are reviewed. Reliability physics model which is appropriate for assessment is used. Using this model, leakage probability, rupture probability and structure failure probability of very high temperature gas cooled reactor are evaluated and classified by detonation volume and distance. Also based on standard safety criteria which is value of $1{\times}10^{-6}$, safety distance between the very high temperature gas cooled reactor and the hydrogen production facility is calculated.

• 한국도로학회논문집
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• 제17권1호
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• pp.105-118
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• 2015

PURPOSES : This study aims to evaluate the road safety of the super-elevation transition section of a left turn curve and suggest the minimum longitudinal grade of a super-elevation transition section to be used before and after a left curved section. METHODS : We evaluated the road condition by means of the safety-criterion-evaluation method involving side friction factors, and then solve the problem by introducing the minimum longitudinal grade criterion based on conditions described in the hydraulics literature. RESULTS : It was calculated that when a road satisfies hydroplaning conditions, the difference between side friction assumed and side friction demanded is less than -0.04. In this case, the safety criterion for the condition is unsatisfied. Conversely, when a road is in a normal state under either wet or dry conditions, it was calculated that the difference between side friction assumed and side friction demanded is more than 0.01. Thus, the safety criterion for this condition is found to be satisfied. After adjusting the minimum longitudinal grade applied to a super-elevation transition section, the hydroplaning condition can be eliminated and the safety criterion can be met for all sections. CONCLUSIONS : It is suggested that a minimum longitudinal grade should be provided on super-elevation transition sections in order to prevent hydroplaning.

• 한국관개배수논문집
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• 제17권2호
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• pp.71-81
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• 2010

Stream Pilot Project, which began in May 2003 and finished in December 2003, was selected to develop effective methods applicable to nature-like streams. Stream restoration projects aim to maintain or increase ecosystem goods and services while protecting downstream and coastal ecosystems. Fields environmental monitoring such as flow discharge and precipitation were conducted along the Idong stream for amount of channel zone change in 2007. This study selected three monitoring positions to measure the water level and discharge of flowing water. A stage-discharge relation is obtained from direct discharge measurements for three stations by fitting an empirical relationship to the data set. Since discharge measures are made only for low flow conditions, a curve of discharge against stage can then be built by fitting these data with a power curve. And this study used data obtained from floodmark checkup as well as HEC-RAS model to analyze the hydrodynamic characteristics of monitoring sites. Reach-averaged hydraulic parameters for the supply reach were calculated from the small area's HEC-RAS model for Idong stream, and a HEC-RAS model used to analyze hydraulics for a period in 2007, after the stream was considered bank stabilization.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제47권3호
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• pp.267-283
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• 2015

The main objective of this study is to investigate experimentally the two-phase flow characteristics in terms of the direct contact condensation of a steam-water stratified flow in a horizontal rectangular channel. Experiments were performed for both air-water and steam-water flows with a cocurrent flow configuration. This work presents the local temperature and velocity distributions in a water layer as well as the interfacial characteristics of both condensing and noncondensing fluid flows. The gas superficial velocity varied from 1.2 m/s to 2.0 m/s for air and from 1.2 m/s to 2.8 m/s for steam under a fixed inlet water superficial velocity of 0.025 m/s. Some advanced measurement methods have been applied to measure the local characteristics of the water layer thickness, temperature, and velocity fields in a horizontal stratified flow. The instantaneous velocity and temperature fields inside the water layer were measured using laser-induced fluorescence and particle image velocimetry, respectively. In addition, the water layer thickness was measured through an ultrasonic method.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제41권7호
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• pp.885-892
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• 2009

This manuscript will discuss a numerical method where the six equations of two-phase flow, the solid heat conduction equations, and the two equations that describe neutron diffusion and precursor concentration are solved together in a tightly coupled, nonlinear fashion for a simplified model of a nuclear reactor core. This approach has two important advantages. The first advantage is a higher level of accuracy. Because the equations are solved together in a single nonlinear system, the solution is more accurate than the traditional "operator split" approach where the two-phase flow equations are solved first, the heat conduction is solved second and the neutron diffusion is solved third, limiting the temporal accuracy to $1^{st}$ order because the nonlinear coupling between the physics is handled explicitly. The second advantage of the method described in this manuscript is that the time step control in the fully implicit system can be based on the timescale of the solution rather than a stability-based time step restriction like the material Courant limit required of operator-split methods. In this work, a pilot code was used which employs this tightly coupled, fully implicit method to simulate a reactor core. Results are presented from a simulated control rod movement which show $2^{nd}$ order accuracy in time. Also described in this paper is a simulated rod ejection demonstrating how the fastest timescale of the problem can change between the state variables of neutronics, conduction and two-phase flow during the course of a transient.

• 산업공학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.658-667
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• 2000

Seasonal variation of natural gas demand coupled with rigid and stable import pattern of gas represents the characteristic feature of the Korean Liquified Natural Gas(LNG) industry. This attribute has required a huge amount of investment for the construction of storage facility. Thus, to minimize the supply cost, it is legitimate to reduce storage requirement itself. In this study, we combine three alternative methods to deal with the storage requirement to minimize the supply cost. Those are (1) adding additional storage tanks, (2) inducing large firm customers, and (3) constructing gas-turbine self generation facilities. Methodologically, we employ the mixed integer program (MIP) to optimize the system. The model also consider demand and price-setting scheme in separate modules. From the results, it is shown that if alternatives are combined optimally, a number of storage tanks can be reduced substantially compared with the original capacity plan set by the industry authorities. We perform various sensitivity analyses to check the robustness of the results. The methodology presented in this study can be applied to the other physical network industry, such as hydraulics. The empirical results will shed some light on the rationalization of capacity planning of the Korean natural gas industry.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제39권4호
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• pp.273-286
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• 2007

This paper presents the research activities performed to date for the development of a supercritical pressure water-cooled reactor (SCWR) in Korea. The research areas include a conceptual design of an SCWR with an internal flow recirculation, a reactor core conceptual design, a heat transfer test with supercritical $CO_2$, an adaptation of an existing safety analysis code to the supercritical pressure condition, and an evaluation of candidate materials through a corrosion study. Methods to reduce the cladding temperature are introduced from two different perspectives, namely, thermal-hydraulics and core neutronics. Briefly described are the results of an experiment on the heat transfer at a supercritical pressure, an experiment that is essential for the analysis of the subchannels of fuel assemblies and the analysis of a system safety. An existing system code has been adapted to SCWR conditions, and the process of a first-hand validation is presented. Finally, the corrosion test results of the candidate materials for an SCWR are introduced.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• 제18권5호
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• pp.493-502
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• 2019

Internal stability is an important safety issue for levees, embankments, and other earthen structures. Since a large part of the world's population lives near oceans, lakes and rivers, floods resulting from breaching of dams can lead to devastating disasters with tremendous loss of life and property, especially in densely populated areas. There are some main factors that affect the internal stability of dams, levees and other earthen structures, such as the erodibility of the soil, the water velocity inside the soil mass and the geometry of the earthen structure, etc. Thus, the mechanism of internal erosion and stability of soils is very complicated and it is vital to investigate the assessment methods of internal stability of soils in embankment dams and their foundations. This paper presents an improved support vector machine (SVM) model to predict the internal stability of soils. The grid search algorithm (GSA) is employed to find the optimal parameters of SVM firstly, and then the cross - validation (CV) method is employed to estimate the classification accuracy of the GSA-SVM model. Two examples of internal stability of soils are presented to validate the predictive capability of the proposed GSA-SVM model. In addition to verify the effectiveness of the proposed GSA-SVM model, the predictions from the proposed GSA-SVM model were compared with those from the traditional back propagation neural network (BPNN) model. The results showed that the proposed GSA-SVM model is a feasible and efficient tool for assessing the internal stability of soils with high accuracy.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권3호
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• pp.804-811
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• 2021

The T-junction exists widely in industrial engineering, especially in nuclear power plants, which plays an important part in nuclear power reactor thermal-hydraulics. However, the existing prediction models of the liquid entrainment are mainly based on the small branches or small breaks while there are a few researches for large branches (d/D > 0.2). Referring to the classical models about the onset of liquid entrainment of the T-junction, most of previous models regard liquid as ideal working fluid and ignore surface tension. This paper aims to study the effect of surface tension on the liquid entrainment, and develops an improved model based on the reasonable assumption. The establishment of new model employs the methods of force analysis, dimensional analysis. Besides, the dimensionless Weber number is adopted innovatively into the model to show the effect of surface tension. What is more, in order to validate the new model, three kinds of working fluids with different surface tensions are creatively adopted in the experiments: water, silicone oil and ethyl alcohol. The final results show that surface tension has a nonnegligible effect on the onset of liquid entrainment in large branch T-junction. The new model is well matched with the experimental data.