• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
• /
• 2009.10a
• /
• pp.437-438
• /
• 2009

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.7-14
• /
• 2010

Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) supports a decision-making process such as establishment of environmental quality criteria. Soil quality criteria (SQC) are essential to protect soil organisms from the exposure to various soil contaminants. In this study, ERA methodologies of advanced countries for soil pollution were extensively compared to propose the ERA approach suitable for soil ecosystem in Korea. The soil ERAs in European Chemical Bureau(ECB), The Netherlands, and Canada can be classified as deterministic ecological risk assessment (DERA), and probabilistic ecological risk assessment (PERA) based on species sensitivity distribution (SSD). We propose three ERA methods according to abundance and reliability of soil ecotoxicity data. The method considered land use such as residential/agricultural, and industrial/commercial uses. The taxonomic groups of soil organism were classified as 'Class' level including different trophic levels (Magnoliopsida or Liliopsida, Clitellata, and Insecta or Secernentea). This study can be used to estimate the soil quality criteria to protect soil biota.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.45 no.2
• /
• pp.265-276
• /
• 2013

Pressure tubes made of Zr-2.5 wt% Nb alloy are important components consisting reactor coolant pressure boundary of a pressurized heavy water reactor, in which unanticipated through-wall cracks and rupture may occur due to a delayed hydride cracking (DHC). The Canadian Standards Association has provided deterministic and probabilistic structural integrity evaluation procedures to protect pressure tubes against DHC. However, intuitive understanding and subsequent assessment of flaw behaviors are still insufficient due to complex degradation mechanisms and diverse influential parameters of DHC compared with those of stress corrosion cracking and fatigue crack growth phenomena. In the present study, a deterministic flaw assessment program was developed and applied for systematic integrity assessment of the pressure tubes. Based on the examination results dealing with effects of flaw shapes, pressure tube dimensional changes, hydrogen concentrations of pressure tubes and plant operation scenarios, a simple and rough method for effective cooldown operation was proposed to minimize DHC risks. The developed deterministic assessment program for pressure tubes can be used to derive further technical bases for probabilistic damage frequency assessment.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.44 no.5
• /
• pp.471-482
• /
• 2012

To assess the risk of nuclear power plant operation and to determine the risk impact of digital systems, there is a need to quantitatively assess the reliability of the digital systems in a justifiable manner. The Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA) is a tool which can reveal shortcomings of the NPP design in general and PRA analysts have not had sufficient guiding principles in modelling particular digital components malfunctions. Currently digital I&C systems are mostly analyzed simply and conventionally in PRA, based on failure mode and effects analysis and fault tree modelling. More dynamic approaches are still in the trial stage and can be difficult to apply in full scale PRA-models. As basic events CPU failures, application software failures and common cause failures (CCF) between identical components are modelled.The primary goal is to model dependencies. However, it is not clear which failure modes or system parts CCF:s should be postulated for. A clear distinction can be made between the treatment of protection and control systems. There is a general consensus that protection systems shall be included in PRA, while control systems can be treated in a limited manner. OECD/NEA CSNI Working Group on Risk Assessment (WGRisk) has set up a task group, called DIGREL, to develop taxonomy of failure modes of digital components for the purposes of PRA. The taxonomy is aimed to be the basis of future modelling and quantification efforts. It will also help to define a structure for data collection and to review PRA studies.

• Computers and Concrete
• /
• v.2 no.5
• /
• pp.345-366
• /
• 2005

This work presents an assessment of the computational performance of a vector-parallel implementation of probabilistic model for concrete cracking in 3D. This paper shows the continuing efforts towards code optimization as reported in earlier works Paz, et al. (2002a,b and 2003). The probabilistic crack approach is based on the direct Monte Carlo method. Cracking is accounted by means of 3D interface elements. This approach considers that all nonlinearities are restricted to interface elements modeling cracks. The heterogeneity governs the overall cracking behavior and related size effects on concrete fracture. Computational kernels in the implementation are the inexact Newton iterative driver to solve the non-linear problem and a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) driver to solve linearized equations, using an element by element (EBE) strategy to compute matrix-vector products. In particular the paper analyzes code behavior using OpenMP directives in parallel vector processors (PVP), such as the CRAY SV1 and CRAY T94. The impact of the memory architecture on code performance, and also some strategies devised to circumvent this issue are addressed by numerical experiment.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.32 no.4
• /
• pp.563-581
• /
• 2009

In this paper, the peak horizontal ground acceleration over the bedrock (PGA) is calculated by a probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA). For this reason, at first, all the occurred earthquakes in a radius of 200 km of Sanandaj city have been gathered. After elimination of the aftershocks and foreshocks, the main earthquakes were taken into consideration to calculate the seismic parameters (SP) by Kijko (2000) method. The seismotectonic model of the considered region and the seismic sources of the region have been modeled. In this research, Sanandaj and its vicinity has been meshed as an 8 (vertical lines) * 10 (horizontal lines) and the PGA is calculated for each point of the mesh using the logic tree method and the five attenuation relationships (AR) with different weighted coefficient. These calculations have been performed by the Poisson distribution of four hazard levels. Then by using it, four regional maps of the seismic hazard regions have been provided for Sanandaj and its vicinity. The results show that the maximum and minimum value of PGA for the return periods of 75, 225, 475, 2475 years are (0.114, 0.074) (0.157, 0.101), (0.189, 0.121) and (0.266, 0.170), respectively.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.699-715
• /
• 2015

A modal parameter based damage sensitive feature (DSF) is defined to mimic the relative change in any diagonal element of the stiffness matrix of a model of a structure. The damage assessment is performed in a statistical pattern recognition framework using empirical complementary cumulative distribution functions (ECCDFs) of the DSFs extracted from measured operational vibration response data. Methods are discussed to perform probabilistic structural health assessment with respect to the following questions: (a) "Is there a change in the current state of the structure compared to the baseline state?", (b) "Does the change indicate a localized stiffness reduction or increase?", with the latter representing a situation of retrofitting operations, and (c) "What is the severity of the change in a probabilistic sense?". To identify a range of normal structural variations due to environmental and operational conditions, lower and upper bound ECCDFs are used to define the baseline structural state. Such an approach attempts to decouple "non-damage" related variations from damage induced changes, and account for the unknown environmental/operational conditions of the current state. The damage assessment procedure is discussed using numerical simulations of ambient vibration testing of a bridge deck system, as well as shake table experimental data from a 4-story steel frame.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.46 no.1
• /
• pp.11-26
• /
• 2014

The analyses carried out within the Seismic Probabilistic Risk Assessments (SPRAs) of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) are affected by significant aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. These uncertainties have to be represented and quantified coherently with the data, information and knowledge available, to provide reasonable assurance that related decisions can be taken robustly and with confidence. The amount of data, information and knowledge available for seismic risk assessment is typically limited, so that the analysis must strongly rely on expert judgments. In this paper, a Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) framework for handling uncertainties in NPP SPRAs is proposed and applied to an example case study. The main contributions of this paper are two: (i) applying the complete DST framework to SPRA models, showing how to build the Dempster-Shafer structures of the uncertainty parameters based on industry generic data, and (ii) embedding Bayesian updating based on plant specific data into the framework. The results of the application to a case study show that the approach is feasible and effective in (i) describing and jointly propagating aleatory and epistemic uncertainties in SPRA models and (ii) providing 'conservative' bounds on the safety quantities of interest (i.e. Core Damage Frequency, CDF) that reflect the (limited) state of knowledge of the experts about the system of interest.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.53 no.2
• /
• pp.498-508
• /
• 2021

Micro reactors are increasingly being considered for utilization as distributed power sources. Hence, the probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of a direct supercritical-CO₂-cooled fast reactor, called micro modular reactor (MMR), was performed in this study; this reactor was developed using innovative design concepts. It adopted a modular design and passive safety systems to minimize site constraints. As the MMR is in its conceptual design phase, design weaknesses and valuable safety insights could be identified during PSA. Level 1 internal event PSA was carried out involving literature survey, system characterization, identification of initiating events, transient analyses, development of event trees and fault trees, and quantification. The initiating events and scenarios significantly contributing to core damage frequency (CDF) were determined to identify design weaknesses in MMR. The most significant initiating event category contributing to CDF was the transients with the power conversion system initially available category, owing to its relatively high occurrence frequency. Further, an importance analysis revealed that the safety of MMR can be significantly improved by improving the reliability of reactor trip and passive decay heat removal system operation. The findings presented in this paper are expected to contribute toward future applications of PSA for assessing unconventional nuclear reactors in their conceptual design phases.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
• /
• v.18 no.6
• /
• pp.661-668
• /
• 2019

Seismic vulnerability assessment is a useful tool for rational safety analysis and planning of large and complex structural systems; it can deal with the effects of uncertainties on the performance of significant structural systems. In this study, an efficient dynamic reliability approach, probability density evolution methodology (PDEM), is proposed for seismic vulnerability analysis of earth dams. The PDEM provides the failure probability of different limit states for various levels of ground motion intensity as well as the mean value, standard deviation and probability density function of the performance metric of the earth dam. Combining the seismic reliability with three different performance levels related to the displacement of the earth dam, the seismic fragility curves are constructed without them being limited to a specific functional form. Furthermore, considering the seismic fragility analysis is a significant procedure in the seismic probabilistic risk assessment of structures, the seismic vulnerability results obtained by the dynamic reliability approach are combined with the results of probabilistic seismic hazard and seismic loss analysis to present and address the PDEM-based seismic probabilistic risk assessment framework by a simulated case study of an earth dam.