• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.62-72
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• 2019

Due to the difficulties in forecasting the intensity and the source location of tsunami the countermeasures prepared based on the deterministic approach fail to work properly. Thus, there is an increasing demand of the tsunami hazard analyses that consider the uncertainties of tsunami behavior in probabilistic approach. In this paper a fundamental study is conducted to perform the probabilistic tsunami hazard analysis (PTHA) for the tsunamis that caused the disaster to the east coast of Korea. A logic tree approach is employed to consider the uncertainties of the initial free surface displacement and the tsunami height distribution along the coast. The branches of the logic tree are constructed by reflecting characteristics of tsunamis that have attacked the east coast of Korea. The computational time is nonlinearly increasing if the number of branches increases in the process of extracting the fractile curves. Thus, an improved method valid even for the case of a huge number of branches is proposed to save the computational time. The performance of the discrete weight distribution method proposed first in this study is compared with those of the conventional sorting method and the Monte Carlo method. The present method is comparable to the conventional methods in its accuracy, and is efficient in the sense of computational time when compared with the conventional sorting method. The Monte Carlo method, however, is more efficient than the other two methods if the number of branches and the number of fault segments increase significantly.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.31-38
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• 2018

Earthquake disasters that exceed the design criteria can pose significant threats to nuclear facilities. Seismic probabilistic safety assessment(PSA) is a probabilistic way to quantify such risks. Accordingly, seismic PSA has been applied to domestic and overseas nuclear power plants, and the safety of nuclear power plants was evaluated and prepared against earthquake hazards. However, there were few examples where seismic PSA was applied in case of a research reactor with a relatively small size compared to nuclear power plants. Therefore, in this study, seismic PSA technique was applied to actually completed research reactor to analyze its safety. Also, based on these results, the optimization study on the seismic capacity of the system constituting the research reactor was carried out. As a result, the possibility of damage to the core caused by the earthquake hazard was quantified in the research reactor and its safety was confirmed. The optimization study showed that the optimal seismic capacity distribution was obtained to ensure maximum safety at a low cost compared with the current design. These results, in the future, can expect to be used as a quantitative indicator to effectively improve the safety of the research reactor with respect to earthquakes.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.19 no.1 s.62
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• pp.26-32
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• 2005

Recent earthquakes, measuring over a magnitude of 5.0, on the eastern coast of Korea, have aroused interest in earthquake analyses and the seismic design of caisson-type breakwaters. Most earthquake analysis methods, such as equivalent static analysis, response spectrum analysis, nonlinear analysis, and capacity analysis, are deterministic and have been used for seismic design and performance evaluation of coastal structures. However, deterministic methods are difficult for reflecting on one of the most important characteristics of earthquakes, i.e. the uncertainty of earthquakes. This paper presents results of probabilistic seismic hazard assessment(PSHA) of an actual caisson-type breakwater, considering uncertainties of earthquake occurrences and soil properties. First, the seismic vulnerability of a structure and the seismic hazard of the site are evaluated, using earthquake sets and a seismic hazard map; then, the seismic risk of the structure is assessed.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.273-282
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• 2023

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) has been widely used to evaluate the seismic risk of nuclear power plants (NPPs). However, studies on seismic PSA for process plants, such as gas plants, oil refineries, and chemical plants, have been scarce. This is because the major disasters to which these process plants are vulnerable include explosions, fires, and release (or dispersion) of toxic chemicals. However, seismic PSA is essential for the plants located in regions with significant earthquake risks. Seismic PSA entails probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA), event tree analysis (ETA), fault tree analysis (FTA), and fragility analysis for the structures and essential equipment items. Among those analyses, ETA can depict the accident sequence for core damage, which is the worst disaster and top event concerning NPPs. However, there is no general top event with regard to process plants. Therefore, PSA cannot be directly applied to process plants. Moreover, there is a paucity of studies on developing fragility curves for various equipment. This paper introduces PSA for gas plants based on FTA, which is then transformed into Bayesian network, that is, a probabilistic graph model that can aid risk-informed decision-making. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a gas plant, and several decision-making cases are demonstrated.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.5C
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• pp.313-322
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• 2006

Liquefaction of soil foundation is one of the major seismic damage types for infrastructures. In this paper, deterministic and probabilistic approaches for the evaluation of liquefaction potential are briefly summarized and the risk assessment method is newly proposed using seismic fragility and seismic hazard analyses. Currently the deterministic approach is widely used to evaluate the liquefaction potential in Korea. However, it is very difficult to handle a certain degree of uncertainties in the soil properties such as elastic modulus and resistant capacity by deterministic approach, and the probabilistic approaches are known as more promising. Two types of probabilistic approaches are introduced including (1) the reliability analysis (to obtain probability of failure) for a given design earthquake and (2) the seismic risk analysis of liquefaction for a specific soil for a given service life. The results from different methods show a similar trend, and the liquefaction potential can be more quantitatively evaluated using the new risk analysis method.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.25-36
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• 2018

Soil liquefaction is one of the types of major seismic damage. Soil liquefaction is a phenomenon that can cause enormous human and economic damages, and it must be examined before designing geotechnical structures. In this study, we proposed a practical method of developing a multi-hazard fragility surface for liquefaction of levee considering earthquake magnitude and water level. Limit state for liquefaction of levee was defined by liquefaction potential index (LPI), which is frequently used to assess the liquefaction susceptibility of soils. In order to consider the uncertainty of soil properties, Monte Carlo Simulation based probabilistic analysis was performed. Based on the analysis results, a 3D fragility surface representing the probability of failure by soil liquefaction as a function of the ground motion and water level has been established. The prepared multi-hazard fragility surface can be used to evaluate the safety of levees against liquefaction and to assess the risk in earthquake and flood prone areas.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.11-20
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• 2008

In probabilistic seismic analysis of nonlinear structural system, dynamic analysis is performed to obtain the distribution of the response estimate using input ground motion time histories which correspond to a given seismic hazard level. This study investigates the differences in the distribution of the responses and the failure probability according to input ground motion models. Two types of input ground motion models are considered: real earthquake records scaled to specified intensity level and artificial input ground motion fitted to design response spectrum. Simulation results fir a nonlinear SDOF system demonstrate that the spectrum matched input ground motion produces larger failure probability than those of scaled input ground motion due to biased responses. Such tendency is more remarkable in the site of soft soil conditions. Analysis results show that such difference of failure probability is due to the conservative estimation of design response spectrum in the range of long period of ground motion.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.177-185
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• 2015

City-based Lifeline is expected to cause significant social and economic loss accompanied the secondary damage such as paralysis of urban functions and a large fire as well as the collapse caused by earthquake. Earthquake Disaster Response System of Korea is being operated with preparation, calculates the probability of failure of the facility through Seismic Fragility Model and evaluates the degree of earthquake disaster. In this paper, the time history analysis of buried gas pipeline in city-based lifeline was performed with consideration for ground characteristics and also seismic fragility model was developed by maximum likelihood estimation method. Analysis model was selected as the high-pressure pipe and the normal-pressure pipe buried in the city of Seoul, Korea's representative, modeling of soil was used for Winkler foundation model. Also, method to apply developed fragility model at GIS is presented.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.52 no.6
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• pp.573-586
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• 2019

A seismic hazard map based on spatial analysis of various sources of geologic seismic information was developed and assessed for regional seismic vulnerability in South Korea. The indicators for assessment were selected in consideration of the geological characteristics affecting the seismic damage. Probabilistic seismic hazard and fault information were used to be associated with the seismic activity hazard and bedrock depth related with the seismic damage hazard was also included. Each indicator was constructed of spatial information using GIS and geostatistical techniques such as ordinary kriging, line density mapping and simple kriging with local varying means. Three spatial information constructed were integrated by assigning weights according to the research purpose, data resolution and accuracy. In the case of probabilistic seismic hazard and fault line density, since the data uncertainty was relatively high, only the trend was intended to be reflected firstly. Finally, the seismic activity hazard was calculated and then integrated with the bedrock depth distribution as seismic damage hazard indicator. As a result, a seismic hazard map was proposed based on the analysis of three spatial data and the southeast and northwest regions of South Korea were assessed as having high seismic hazard. The results of this study are expected to be used as basic data for constructing seismic risk management systems to minimize earthquake disasters.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.205-216
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• 2024

Recently, seismic Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) methods have been developed for process plants, such as gas plants, oil refineries, and chemical plants. The framework originated from the PSA of nuclear power plants, which aims to assess the risk of reactor core damage. The original PSA method was modified to adopt the characteristics of a process plant whose purpose is continuous operation without shutdown. Therefore, a fault tree, whose top event is shut down, was constructed and transformed into a Bayesian Network (BN), a probabilistic graph model, for efficient risk-informed decision-making. In this research, the fault tree-based BN from the previous research is further developed to consider the multi-hazard of earthquake-induced fire and explosion (EQ-induced F&E). For this purpose, an event tree describing the occurrence of fire and explosion from a release is first constructed and transformed into a BN. And then, this BN is connected to the previous BN model developed for seismic PSA. A virtual plot plan of a gas plant is introduced as a basis for the construction of the specific EQ-induced F&E BN to test the proposed BN framework. The paper demonstrates the method through two examples of risk-informed decision-making. In particular, the second example verifies how the proposed method can establish a repair and retrofit strategy when a shutdown occurs in a process plant.