• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.709-718
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• 2019

The international nuclear industry has undergone a lot of changes since the Fukushima, Chernobyl and TMI nuclear power plant accidents. However, there are still large and small component deficiencies at nuclear power plants in the world. There are many causes of electrical equipment defects. There are also factors that cause component failures due to human errors. This paper analyzed the root causes of failure and types of human error in 300 cases of electrical component failures. We analyzed the operating experience of electrical components by methods of root causes in K-HPES (Korean-version of Human Performance Enhancement System) and by methods of human error types in HuRAM+ (Human error-Related event root cause Analysis Method Plus). As a result of analysis, the most electrical component failures appeared as circuit breakers and emergency generators. The major causes of failure showed deterioration and contact failure of electrical components by human error of operations management. The causes of direct failure were due to aged components. Types of human error affecting the causes of electrical equipment failure are as follows. The human error type group I showed that errors of commission (EOC) were 97%, the human error type group II showed that slip/lapse errors were 74%, and the human error type group III showed that latent errors were 95%. This paper is meaningful in that we have approached the causes of electrical equipment failures from a comprehensive human error perspective and found a countermeasure against the root cause. This study will help human performance enhancement in nuclear power plants. However, this paper has done a lot of research on improving human performance in the maintenance field rather than in the design and construction stages. In the future, continuous research on types of human error and prevention measures in the design and construction sector will be required.

• IE interfaces
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.27-33
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• 2003

The maintenance cost in K Steelworks has been continuously increased in proportion to the production cost. However, there seems to be a possibility of reducing cost through the optimization of maintenance actions. The failure types of the equipment in steelworks ate various with different failure cost. Thus the failure rate and cost of each type of failures should be considered simultaneously when the optimum maintenance period is to be determined. It is considered that the equipment undergoes periodic replacement and a specified number of incomplete preventive maintenance actions are performed during a replacement period. Assuming that the time to failure follows a Weibull distribution, the parameters of the failure rate are estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation. The optimal replacement period is determined to minimize the average cost per unit time. As the result of analysis it is suggested that the existing maintenance period for a hot-rolling equipment can be extended significantly.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.919-933
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• 2017

A series of Brazilian tests under diameter compression for disc specimens was carried out to investigate the strength and failure behavior by using acoustic emission (AE) and photography monitoring technique. On the basis of experimental results, load-displacement curves, AE counts, real-time crack evolution process, failure modes and strength property of granite specimens containing two pre-existing holes were analyzed in detail. Two typical types of load-displacement curves are identified, i.e., sudden instability (type I) and progressive failure (type II). In accordance with the two types of load-displacement curves, the AE events also have different responses. The present experiments on disc specimens containing two pre-existing holes under Brazilian test reveal four distinct failure modes, including diametrical splitting failure mode (mode I), one crack coalescence failure mode (mode II), two crack coalescences failure mode (mode III) and no crack coalescence failure mode (mode IV). Compared with intact granite specimen, the disc specimen containing two holes fails with lower strength, which is closely related to the bridge angle. The failure strength of pre-holed specimen first decreases and then increases with the bridge angle. Finally, a preliminary interpretation was proposed to explain the strength evolution law of granite specimen containing two holes based on the microscopic observation of fracture plane.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.503-512
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• 2020

Mining activities focus on the production of mineral resources for energy generation and raw material requirements worldwide and it is a known fact that shallow reserves become scarce. For this reason, exploration of new resources proceeds consistently to meet the increasing energy and raw material demand of industrial activities. Rock mechanics has a vital role in underground mining and surface mining. Devices and instruments used in laboratory testing to determine rock mechanics related parameters might have limited sensing capability of the failure behavior. However, methodologies such as, thermal cameras, digital speckle correlation method and acoustic emission might enable to investigate the initial crack formation in detail. Regarding this, in this study, thermographic analysis was performed to analyze the failure behaviors of different types of rock specimens during uniaxial compressive strength experiments. The energy dissipation profiles of different types of rocks were characterized by the temperature difference recorded with an infrared thermal camera during experiments. The temperature increase at the failure moment was detected as 4.45℃ and 9.58℃ for andesite and gneiss-schist specimens, respectively. Higher temperature increase was observed with respect to higher UCS value. Besides, a temperature decreases of about 0.5-0.6℃ was recorded during the experiments of the marble specimens. The temperature change on the specimen is related to release of radiation energy. As a result of the porosity tests, it was observed that increase in the porosity rate from 5.65% to 20.97% can be associated to higher radiation energy released, from 12.68 kJ to 297.18 kJ.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.935-940
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• 2002

This paper presents the failure mode on Headed Bars and prediction of tensile capacity, which is governed by concrete cone failure. 17 different plate types, three different concrete strengths and three different welding types of specimens were simulated. Static tensile load was applied Headed Bars were manufactured in different areas, and their shape and thickness are based on ASTM 970-98. Calculation of embedment length in concrete is conducted based on CSA 23.3-94, and static tensile load was applied. Tested pullout capacities were compared to the values determined using current design methods such as ACI-349 and CCD method.

• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.99-111
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• 2015

In this paper, we study the reliability analysis of a repairable system with two types of failure in which switching failures and reboot delay are considered. Let units in this system be cold standby, and failure rate and repair rate of [type1, type2] components be exponentially distributed. The expressions of reliability characteristics - such as the system reliability and the mean time to system failure MTTF - are derived. We use several cases to graphically analyze the effect of various system parameters on the system reliability and MTTF. We also perform a sensitivity analysis of the reliability characteristics with changes in specific values of the system's parameters.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2022

An efficient and accurate classification method for failure modes of reinforced concrete (RC) columns was proposed based on key characteristic parameters. The weight coefficients of seven characteristic parameters for failure modes of RC columns were determined first based on the support vector machine-recursive feature elimination. Then key characteristic parameters for classifying flexure, flexure-shear and shear failure modes of RC columns were selected respectively. Subsequently, a support vector machine with key characteristic parameters (SVM-K) was proposed to classify three types of failure modes of RC columns. The optimal parameters of SVM-K were determined by using the ten-fold cross-validation and the grid-search algorithm based on 270 sets of available experimental data. Results indicate that the proposed SVM-K has high overall accuracy, recall and precision (e.g., accuracy>95%, recall>90%, precision>90%), which means that the proposed SVM-K has superior performance for classification of failure modes of RC columns. Based on the selected key characteristic parameters for different types of failure modes of RC columns, the accuracy of SVM-K is improved and the decision function of SVM-K is simplified by reducing the dimensions and number of support vectors.

• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2015

In this paper, we investigate reliability and availability of repairable systems with two types of failure. The first one is to one unit and the second one is to M units in parallel structure. Let failure rate and repair rate of [type1, type2] components are assumed to be exponentially distributed. The expressions of availability and reliability characteristics such as the system reliability and the mean time to failure are derived for two systems. We used several cases to analyze graphically the effect of various system parameters on the reliability system and availability system.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.53-65
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• 2002

This paper studies an economic manufacturing quantity (EMQ) model with two types of failures and planned preventive maintenance of the production facility. One is a type I (major) failure which should be corrected by a failure maintenance and the other is a type H (minor) failure which can be minimally repaired without interrupting the production run. The objective is to determine the lot size and preventive replacement policy minimizing the long-run expected cost per unit time. We consider a control policy with a constant production lot size and preventive maintenance after completing n production runs. It is assumed that both preventive and failure maintenance times are random and the demand arriving during a stock-out period is lost. An expression for the expected cost per unit time is obtained in the general case. A special case is discussed and numerical results are provided.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.83-91
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• 2006

Recently, the intensive rainstorm possibly induced by global warming plays a key role on the instability of railway adjacent slopes. The instability of slopes results as covering and loss of railway lines induced by slided soil mass. According to the site investigation on the failed slopes triggered by rainfall, low types of slope failure were observed: shallow, intermediate, gully erosion, and soil-rock interface failures. The observation reveals the different characteristics of slope failure depending on the thickness of soil layer, morphological features of slope, etc. Based upon the observations, flume tests were conducted to analyze the sliding mechanism of each failure. The variables of flume test are soil layer thickness, rainfall intensity, and morphology of slope under the constant condition of the percentage of fine, initial soil moisture content, slope angle and compaction energy. Test results show that shallow failure was mostly observed from the surface of the slope and caused by the soil erosion; in addition, compared to the other types of failure, the occurrence of initial erosion is late, however, the development of erosion is fast. In gully erosion failure, the collected water from the water catchment area helps erosion of the upper soil layer and transfer of residual corestone, which impedes the erosion process once the upper soil layers are eroded and corestone are exposed. The soil-rock interface failure shows the most fast initial erosion process among the failure types. Interestingly, the common feature observed from the different types of failure was the occurrence of the initial deformation near the toe of slopes which implies the existence of surbsurface flow along the downslope direction.