• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.79-90
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• 2005

In this paper are reviewed the current status of nuclear fuel management and reactor operational aid tools. In addition, we indicate deficiencies in current capabilities and what future research is judged warranted. For the nuclear fuel management review the focus is on light water reactors and the utilization of stochastic optimization methods applied to the lattice, fuel bundle, core loading pattern, and for BWRs the control rod pattern/core flow design decision making problems. Significant progress in addressing separately each of these design problems on a single cycle basis is noted; however, the outstanding challenge of addressing the integrated design problem over multiple cycles under conditions of uncertainty remains to be addressed. For the reactor operational aid tools review the focus is on core simulators, used to both process core instrumentation signals and as an operator aid to predict future core behaviors under various operational strategies. After briefly reviewing the current status of capabilities, a more in depth review of adaptive core simulation capabilities, where core simulator input data are adjusted within their known uncertainties to improved agreement between prediction and measurement, is presented. This is done in support of the belief that further development of adaptive core simulation capabilities is required to further significantly advance the utility of core simulators in support of reactor operational aid tools.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.12
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• pp.2709-2716
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• 2020

Compositions of large nuclear cores (e.g. boiling water reactors) are highly heterogeneous in terms of fuel composition, control rod insertions and flow regimes. For this reason, they usually lack high order of symmetry (e.g. 1/4, 1/8) making it difficult to estimate their neutronic parameters for large spaces of possible loading patterns. A detailed hyperparameter optimization technique (a combination of manual and Gaussian process search) is used to train and optimize deep neural networks for the prediction of three neutronic parameters for the Ringhals-1 BWR unit: power peaking factors (PPF), control rod bank level, and cycle length. Simulation data is generated based on half-symmetry using PARCS core simulator by shuffling a total of 196 assemblies. The results demonstrate a promising performance by the deep networks as acceptable mean absolute error values are found for the global maximum PPF (~0.2) and for the radially and axially averaged PPF (~0.05). The mean difference between targets and predictions for the control rod level is about 5% insertion depth. Lastly, cycle length labels are predicted with 82% accuracy. The results also demonstrate that 10,000 samples are adequate to capture about 80% of the high-dimensional space, with minor improvements found for larger number of samples. The promising findings of this work prove the ability of deep neural networks to resolve high dimensionality issues of large cores in the nuclear area.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.410-423
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• 2019

Fire suppression using a water mist nozzle directly above an n-Heptane pool in a fire compartment with a door opening was numerically investigated using the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) for the purpose of application in nuclear power plants. Input parameters for the numerical simulation were determined by experimental measurements. Water mist was activated 10 s after the fire began. The sensitivity analysis was conducted for three input parameters: total number of cubic cells of 6032-2,926,400, droplets per second of 1000-500,000, and extinguishing coefficient of 0-100. In a new simple calibration method of this study, the extinguishing coefficient yielding the fire suppression time closest to that measured by experiments was found for use as the FDS simulation input value. When the water mist jet flow made contact with the developed fire, the heat release rate instantaneously increased, and then rapidly decreased. This phenomenon occurred with a displacement of the flame near the liquid fuel pool. Changing the configuration of the door opening with different aspect ratios and opening ratios had impact on the maximum value of the heat release rate due to the flame displacement.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.280-284
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• 2021

In this paper, a new ESD protection circuit is proposed to improve the snapback characteristics. The proposed a new structure ESD protection circuit applying the conventional SCR structural change and stack structure. The electrical characteristics of the structure using penta-well and double trigger were analyzed, and the trigger voltage and holding voltage were improved by applying the stack structure. The electron current and total current flow were analyzed through the TCAD simulation. The characteristics of the latch-up immunity and excellent snapback characteristics were confirmed. The electrical characteristics of the proposed ESD protection circuit were analyzed through HBM modeling after forming a structure through TCAD simulator.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.23-28
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• 2023

This paper demonstrates a novel NAND flash memory structure and annealing configuration including through-silicon via (TSV) inside the silicon substrate to improve annealing efficiency using an electro-thermal annealing (ETA) technique. Compared with the conventional ETA which utilizes WL-to-WL current flow, the proposed annealing method has a higher annealing temperature as well as more uniform heat distribution, because of thermal isolation on the silicon substrate. In addition, it was found that the annealing temperature is related to the electrical and thermal conductivity of the TSV materials. As a result, it is possible to improve the reliability of NAND flash memory. All the results are discussed based on 3-dimensional (3-D) simulations with the aid of the COMSOL simulator.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.267-273
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• 2023

As the impacts of global climate change become increasingly apparent, the reduction of carbon emissions has emerged as a critical subject of discussion. Nuclear power has garnered attention as a potential carbon-free energy source; however, the rapidity of load following in nuclear power generation poses challenges in comparison to fossil-fueled methods. Consequently, power-to-gas systems, which integrate nuclear power and hydrogen, have attracted growing interest. This study presents a preliminary design of a very high temperature reactor (VHTR) integrated blue hydrogen production process utilizing DWSIM, an open-source process simulator. The blue hydrogen production process is estimated to supply the necessary calorific value for carbon capture through tail gas combustion heat. Moreover, a thermodynamic assessment of the main recuperator is performed as a function of the helium flow rate from the VHTR system to the blue hydrogen production system.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.8-13
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• 2023

In this study, it was studied whether a new measurement factor "frictional vibration" that occurs due to the material flow of the die and sheet metal in the flange area during deep drawing process, could be measured using an vibration sensor. The blank holder force acting on the flange area during drawing processing acts as a friction force in the opposite direction into which the sheet material flows and causes friction vibration. As the blank holder force increases, the friction force increases, and as the blank holder force decreases, the friction force also decreases. Because of this, friction vibration also increases and decreases in proportion to the size of the blank holder force. According to this theory, whether frictional vibration occurs was measured using a flange simulator and a vibration sensor. The initial pressure was created using a torque wrench, and it was confirmed that the amplitude increased by about 4 times when torque 6 Nm was increased. When the forming velocity was rapidly changed to 300 mm/min, the amplitude increased approximately 4 times. It was confirmed that the amplitude of frictional vibration according to the measurement location was greater the further away from the specimen. It was verified that a new measurement factor "friction vibration" in the flange area can be measured and used for online monitoring.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.12
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• pp.4408-4425
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• 2023

Alarm flood due to abnormality propagation is the most difficult alarm overloading problem in nuclear power plants (NPPs). Root-cause analysis is suggested to help operators in understand emergency events and plant status. Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) has been extensively applied in alarm management by virtue of the capability of explaining causal dependencies among alarms. However, there has never been a technique that can identify the actual root cause for complex alarm situations. This paper presents an automated root-cause analysis system based on MFM. The causal reasoning algorithm is first applied to identify several possible root causes that can lead to massive alarms. A novel root-cause ranking algorithm can subsequently be used to isolate the most likely faults from the other root-cause candidates. The proposed method is validated on a pressurized water reactor (PWR) simulator at HAMMLAB. The results show that the actual root cause is accurately identified for every tested operating scenario. The automation of root-cause identification and ranking affords the opportunity of real-time alarm analysis. It is believed that the study can further improve the situation awareness of operators in the alarm flooding situation.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.54-67
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• 2013

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the diversion rate by the levels of delay and the types of display. For this study, we developed the logit model by analyzing the result of SP survey of drivers who have driver's licence after manipulating a virtual driving simulator. The result of analysis was that the types of display was not statistically significant to the diversion rate. On the other hand, the levels of delay was very meaningful factor with the diversion rate. When the main road was flowing smoothly, drivers started to detour at the levels of delay 125% under the traffic free flow state. Similarly, when the levels of delay got worse, the diversion rate kept the same percentage as it was at the levels of delay 125% state which represented a smooth road condition. Likewise, when the main road's traffic flow was slow, drivers appeared to make detours at the same state of the levels of delay 125%. It was found that as the levels of delay got worse, the diversion rose higher than the diversion rate at the condition of slow traffic flow situation with the levels of delay 125%. The result of this study suggests the criterion of drivers detour point. For the conclusion, the result of study would be a reasonable reference for establishing transportation strategies by reflecting drivers' detouring property and would improve the efficiency of traffic flow.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.48 no.7
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• pp.595-604
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• 2015

Interrill erosion by the rainfall is divided into a detachment of soil particles by raindrop splash when raindrops having kinetic energy strike on the surface soil and a sediment transport by sheet flow of surface runoff. Rainfall kinetic energy is widely used as an indicator expressing the potential ability to separate the soil particles from soil mass. In this study, the soil erosion experiments of rainfall simulation were operated to evaluate the effects of rainfall kinetic energy on interrill erosion as using the strip cover to control raindrop impact. The kinetic energy from rainfall simulator was 0.58 times to that of natural rainfall. Surface runoff and subsurface runoff increased and decreased respectively with increase of rainfall intensity. Surface runoff discharge from plots of non-cover was 1.82 times more than that from plots with cover. The rainfall kinetic energy influenced on the starting time of surface and subsurface runoff. Soil erosion quantity greatly varied according to existence of the surface cover that can intercept rainfall energy. Sediment yields by the interaction between raindrop splash and sheet flow increased 3.6~5.9 times and the increase rates of those decreased with rainfall intensity. As a results from analysis of relationship between stream power and sediment yields, rainfall kinetic energy increased the transport capacity according to increase of surface runoff as well as the detachment of soil particles by raindrop splash.