• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권8호
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• pp.2915-2923
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• 2022

There is an increasing interest in passive safety systems to minimize the need for operator intervention or external power sources in nuclear power plants. Because a passive system has a weak driving force, there is greater uncertainty in the performance compared with an active system. In previous studies, several methods have been suggested to evaluate passive system reliability, and many of them estimated the failure probability using thermal-hydraulic analyses and the Monte Carlo method. However, if the functional failure of a passive system is rare, it is difficult to estimate the failure probability using conventional methods owing to their high computational time. In this paper, a procedure for the application of the Chernoff bound to the evaluation of passive system reliability is proposed. A feasibility study of the procedure was conducted on a passive decay heat removal system of a micro modular reactor in its conceptual design phase, and it was demonstrated that the passive system reliability can be evaluated without performing a large number of thermal-hydraulic analyses or Monte Carlo simulations when the system has a small failure probability. Accordingly, the advantages and constraints of applying the Chernoff bound for passive system reliability evaluation are discussed in this paper.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제49권2호
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• pp.360-372
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• 2017

Many advanced reactor designs rely on passive systems to fulfill safety functions during accident sequences. These systems depend heavily on boundary conditions to induce a motive force, meaning the system can fail to operate as intended because of deviations in boundary conditions, rather than as the result of physical failures. Furthermore, passive systems may operate in intermediate or degraded modes. These factors make passive system operation difficult to characterize within a traditional probabilistic framework that only recognizes discrete operating modes and does not allow for the explicit consideration of time-dependent boundary conditions. Argonne National Laboratory has been examining various methodologies for assessing passive system reliability within a probabilistic risk assessment for a station blackout event at an advanced small modular reactor. This paper provides an overview of a passive system reliability demonstration analysis for an external event. Considering an earthquake with the possibility of site flooding, the analysis focuses on the behavior of the passive Reactor Cavity Cooling System following potential physical damage and system flooding. The assessment approach seeks to combine mechanistic and simulation-based methods to leverage the benefits of the simulation-based approach without the need to substantially deviate from conventional probabilistic risk assessment techniques. Although this study is presented as only an example analysis, the results appear to demonstrate a high level of reliability of the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (and the reactor system in general) for the postulated transient event.

• 조명전기설비학회논문지
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• 제25권1호
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• pp.101-106
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• 2011

The failure of cooling system in Superconducting Fault Current Limiter(SFCL) increases the impedance of superconducting device, and due to malfunction of inner switches the SFCL opens the distribution system inadvertently when required to do so. In this paper, the ground fault and short circuit fault were classified as active failure and the open circuit fault was passive failure. A reliability model of SFCL considers the passive failure as well as active failure, and in the case study the reliability indices of distribution system are evaluated. It is possible that the reliability evaluation excluded passive failure makes the customers reliability seem so worse than it really was. Therefore, the reliability models of SFCL must include the active failure and passive failure together to evaluate the reliability of distribution system connected SFCL.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권1호
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• pp.45-53
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• 2019

Thermal-hydraulic passive safety systems (PSSs) are incorporated into many advanced reactor designs on the bases of simplicity, economics and inherent safety nature. Several factors among which are the critical parameters (CPs) that influence failure and reliability of thermal-hydraulic (t-h) passive systems are now being explored. For simplicity, it is assumed in most reliability analyses that the CPs are independent whereas in practice this assumption is not always valid. There is need to critically examine the dependency influence of the CPs on reliability of the t-h passive systems at design stage and in operation to guarantee safety/better performance. In this paper, two multivariate analysis methods (covariance and conditional subjective probability density function) were presented and applied to a simple PSS. The methods followed a generalized procedure for evaluating t-h reliability based on dependency consideration. A passively water-cooled steam generator was used to demonstrate the dependency of the identified key CPs using the methods. The results obtained from the methods are in agreement and justified the need to consider the dependency of CPs in t-h reliability. For dependable t-h reliability, it is advisable to adopt all possible CPs and apply suitable multivariate method in dependency consideration of CPs among other factors.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.2047-2052
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• 2023

Risk-informed approach has been widely applied in the safety design, regulation, and operation of nuclear reactors. It has been commonly accepted that risk-informed design optimization should be used in the innovative reactor designs to make nuclear system highly safe and reliable. In spite of the risk-informed approach has been used in some advanced nuclear reactors designs, such as Westinghouse IRIS, Gen-IV sodium fast reactors and lead-based fast reactors, the process of risk-informed design of nuclear reactors is hardly to carry out when passive system reliability should be integrated in the framework. A practical method for new passive safety reactors based on probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) and passive system reliability analyze linking is proposed in this paper. New three-dimension frequency-consequence curve based on risk concept with three variables is used in this method. The proposed method has been applied to the determination optimization of design options selection in a 10 MWth lead-based research reactor(LR) to obtain one optimized system design in conceptual design stage, using the integrated reliability and probabilistic safety assessment program RiskA, and the computation resources and time consumption in this process was demonstrated reasonable and acceptable.

• 한국안전학회지
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• 제26권4호
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• pp.7-13
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• 2011

A study on reliability estimation of sequential-ordered multiple failure modes, which are sequentially ordered between failure modes in a considering system, was performed. Especially, an approach to estimate the probabilities of failure modes has been proposed under an assumption that failure modes are mutually exclusive and sequentially ordered by only a critical variable. A feasibility of the proposed approach were studied by a practical example, which is a reliability estimation of passive safety systems for a probabilistic safety assessment(PSA) of a very high temperature reactor(VHTR) that is under development as a future nuclear system with enhanced safety features. It is difficult to define a robust failure state of this nuclear system because of its enhanced radiation release characteristics, so the new approach is a useful concept to estimate not only its safety but also a PSA. A feasibility study applied two failure modes(e.g., small and large release of radioactive materials) with considering the integrated behavior of this nuclear system. It is expected that the multiple release states for a practical estimation can be easily extended to the aforementioned example. It was found out that the proposed approach was a useful technique to cover the unfavorable features of this nuclear system as to performing a VHTR PSA.

• 조명전기설비학회논문지
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• 제27권11호
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• pp.27-36
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• 2013

Islanding in a gird connected inverter of wind power generation system may influence a bad effect on equipments or yield safety hazards on grid so it should be detected rapidly and exactly. A passive method to detect islanding is comparatively simpler than an active method but suffers from non detection zone (NDZ). On the other hand, the active method can significantly reduce NDZ by injecting a disturbance into inverter output. To improve the reliability of islanding detection, this paper proposes a hybrid anti-islanding detection method combining the conventional passive method as well as the active method based on novel harmonic injection method using fourier transform. The proposed scheme is fast to detect islanding when NDZ does not exist because it has the nature of passive method. Under NDZ, the active method can detect occurrence of islanding reliably. The effectiveness and validity of the proposed scheme is proved through comparative simulations.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제18권2호
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• pp.364-374
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• 2018

A novel passive lossless soft-switching single inductor dual buck full-bridge inverter (PLSSIDBFBI) is presented in this paper. To accomplish this, a passive lossless snubber circuit is added to a dual buck full-bridge inverter. Therefore, the advantages of the dual buck full-bridge inverter are included in the proposed inverter, and the inverter has just one filter inductor, which can decrease the system volume and improve the integration. In addition, the passive lossless snubber circuit achieves soft-switching by its own resonance, and all of the energy stored in the passive lossless snubber circuit can be transferred to load. A comparison between eight topologies is performed in this paper, and the analysis shows that the proposed soft-switching inverter topology has high reliability and efficiency. Finally, experimental results obtained with a 1 kW prototype verify the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the prominent characteristics of a reduced switching loss and improved efficiency.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권3호
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• pp.676-682
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• 2019

After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, there has been an increasing preference for passive safety features in the nuclear power industry. Some passive safety systems require limited active components to trigger subsequent passive operation. Under very serious accident conditions, passive safety features could be rendered inoperable or damaged. This study evaluates (i) the performance and effectiveness of the passive safety features of iPOWER (innovative Power Reactor), and (ii) whether a severe accident condition could be reached if the passive safety systems are damaged, namely the case of heat exchanger tube rupture. Analysis results show that the reactor coolant system remains in the hot shutdown condition without operator actions or electricity for over 72 h when the passive auxiliary feedwater systems (PAFSs) are operable without damage. However, heat exchanger tube rupture in the PAFS leads to core damage after about 18 h. Such results demonstrate that, to enhance the safety of iPOWER, maintaining the integrity of the PAFS is critical, and therefore additional protections for PAFS are necessary. To improve the reliability of iPOWER, additional battery sets are necessary for the passive safety systems using limited active components for accident mitigation under such extreme circumstances.

• 한국안전학회지
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• 제31권5호
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• pp.95-101
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• 2016

This study proposes a multi-scale dynamic system reliability analysis of control system as a method of quantitative evaluation of its performance in probabilistic terms. In this second paper, we discuss the control effect of the viscous damper on the seismic performance of the structure-level failure. Since the failure of one structural member does not necessarily cause the collapse of the structural system, we need to consider a set of failure scenarios of the structural system and compute the sum of the failure probabilities of the failure scenarios where the statistical dependence between the failure scenarios should be taken into account. Therefore, this computation requires additional system reliability analysis. As a result, the proposed approach takes a hierarchial framework where the failure probability of a structural member is computed using a lower-scale system reliability with the union set of time-sequential member failures and their statistical dependence, and the failure probability of the structural system is again computed using a higher-scale system reliability with the member failure probabilities obtained by the lower-scale system reliability and their statistical dependence. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach can provide an accurate and stable reliability assessment of the control performance of the viscous damper system on the system failure. Also, the parametric study of damper capacity on the seismic performance has been performed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach through the probabilistic assessment of the seismic performance improvement of the damper system.