• Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.135-143
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• 2016

Biogas is a renewable fuel from anaerobic digestion of organic matters such as sewage sludge, manure and food waste. Raw biogas consists mainly of methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and water. Biogas may also contain other impurities such as siloxanes, halogenated hydrocarbons, aromatic hydrocarbons. Efficient power technologies such as fuel cell demand ultra-low concentration of containments in the biogas feed, imposing stringent requirements on fuel purification technology. Biogas is upgraded from pressure swing adsorption after biogas purification process which consists of water, $H_2S$ and siloxane removal. A polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell power plant is designed to operate on reformate produced from upgraded biogas by steam reformer.

• Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.309-315
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• 2018

Chlortetracycline (CTC) is one of the most important compounds in antibiotic production, and its distribution has been widely investigated due to health and ecological concerns. This study presents systematic approach to optimize the high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry for analyzing CTC in a multiple reaction monitoring mode ($479{\rightarrow}462m/z$). One-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) test with response surface analysis (RSA) was used as optimization strategy. In OFAT tests, the fragmentor voltage, collision energy, and ratio of acetonitrile in the mobile phase were selected as major factors for RSA. The experimental conditions were determined using a composite in cube design (CCD) to maximize the peak area. As a result, the partial cubic model precisely predicted the peak area response with high statistical significance. In the model, the (solvent composition) and (collision $energy^2$) terms were statistically significant at the 0.1 ${\alpha}$-level, while the two-way interactions of the independent variables were negligible. By analyzing the model equation, the optimum conditions were derived as 114.9 V, 15.7 eV, and 70.9% for the fragmentor voltage, collision energy, and solvent composition, respectively. The RSA, coupled with the CCD, offered a comprehensive understanding of the peak area that responds to changes in experimental conditions.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.87-95
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• 2011

The urgent VAI(Vital Area Identification) method development is required since 'The Act of Physical Protection and Radiological Emergency' that is established in 2003 requires an evaluation of physical threats in nuclear facilities and an establishment of physical protection in Korea. The KAERI(Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) has developed the VAI methodology and VAI software called as VIPEX(Vital area Identification Package EXpert) for identifying the vital areas. This study is to demonstrate the applicability of KAERI's VAI methodology to a hypothetical facility, and to identify the importance of information of cable and piping runs when identifying the vital areas. It is necessarily needed to consider cable and piping runs to determine the accurate and realistic TEPS(Top Event Prevention Set). If the information of cable and piping runs of a nuclear power plant is not considered when determining the TEPSs, it is absolutely impossible to acquire the complete TEPSs, and the results could be distorted by missing it. The VIPEX and FTREX(Fault Tree Reliability Evaluation eXpert) properly calculate MCSs and TEPSs using the fault tree model, and provide the most cost-effective method to save the VAI and physical protection costs.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.211-221
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• 2020

One fundamental element of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) is the initiating event (IE) analysis. Since IE frequencies can change over time, time-trend analysis is required to obtain optimized IE frequencies. Accordingly, such time-trend analyses have been employed to estimate industry-average IE frequencies for use in the PSAs of U.S. nuclear power plants (NPPs); existing PSAs of Korean NPPs, however, neglect such analysis in the estimation of IE frequencies. This article therefore provides the method for and results of estimating Korean industry-average IE frequencies using time-trend analysis. It also examines the effects of the IE frequencies obtained from this study on risk insights by applying them to recently updated internal events Level 1 PSA models (at-power and shutdown) for an OPR-1000 plant. As a result, at-power core damage frequency decreased while shutdown core damage frequency increased, with the related contributions from each IE category changing accordingly. These results imply that the incorporation of time-trend analysis leads to different IE frequencies and resulting risk insights. The IE frequency distributions presented in this study can be used in future PSA updates for Korean NPPs, and should be further updated themselves by adding more recent data.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.311-316
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• 2004

For the location estimation in the conventional LPMS(Loose Parts Monitoring System), it is popular to employ a group delay among the acoustic sensors installed within a 3 ft range from the impact source. However, there exists inherent error in determining the arrival time differences of the generated wave group among the neighboring sensors. To overcome this problem in this study, the two dimensional approach has been proposed and applied to effectively estimate the arrival time differences by using a continuous wavelet transform which is one of the linear time-frequency analysis methods. The experiment has been performed to both the plate model and the real steam generator in a nuclear power plant. It is expected that the reliability of the location estimation could be enhanced when the proposed time-frequency method is introduced into the LPMS system.

• Journal of Radiation Industry
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.123-130
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• 2017

Concerns about high radiation exposure to the hands of radiation workers who may contact with radioactive contamination on surfaces in a nuclear power plant (NPP) had been raised, and the Korean regulatory body required the extremity dose estimation during contact tasks with radioactive materials. Korean NPPs conducted field tests to identify the incident radiation to the hands of radiation workers who may contact with radioactive contamination during maintenance periods. The results showed that the radiation fields for contact tasks are dominated by high energy photons. It was also found that the radiation doses to the hands of radiation workers in Korean NPPs were much less than the annual dose limits for extremities. This approach can be applicable to measure and estimate the extremity dose to the hands of medical workers who handle the radioactive materials in a hospital.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.11-26
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• 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
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• v.53 no.10
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• pp.3298-3313
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• 2021

The objective of this study is to estimate the occurrence probabilities of severe accident phenomena based on a fuzzy elicitation technique. Normally, it is difficult to determine these probabilities due to the lack of information on severe accident progression and the highly uncertain values currently in use. In this case, fuzzy set theory (FST) can be best exploited. First, questions were devised for expert elicitation on technical issues of severe accident phenomena. To deal with ambiguities and the imprecision of previously developed (reference) probabilities, fuzzy aggregation methods based on FST were employed to derive the occurrence probabilities of severe accidents via four phases: 1) choosing experts, 2) quantifying weighting factors for the experts, 3) aggregating the experts' opinions, and 4) defuzzifying the fuzzy numbers. In this way, this study obtained expert elicitation results in the form of updated occurrence probabilities of severe accident phenomena in the OPR-1000 plant, after which the differences between the reference probabilities and the newly acquired probabilities using fuzzy aggregation were compared, with the advantages of the fuzzy technique over other approaches explained. Lastly, the impact of applying the updated severe accident probabilities on containment integrity was quantitatively investigated in a Level 2 PSA model.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2304-2311
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• 2021

The dislocation density in strain-hardened Alloy 690 was analyzed using scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to study the relationship between the local plastic strain and susceptibility to primary water stress corrosion cracking (PWSCC) in nuclear power plants. The test material was cold-rolled at various thickness reduction ratios from 10% to 40% to simulate the strain-hardening condition of plant components. The dislocation densities were measured at grain boundaries (GB) and in grain interiors of strain-hardened specimens from STEM images. The dislocation density in the grain interior monotonically increased as the strain-hardening proceeded, while the dislocation density at the GB increased with strain-hardening up to 20% but slightly decreases upon further deformation to 40%. The decreased dislocation density at the GB was attributed to the formation of deformation twins. After the PWSCC growth test of strain-hardened Alloy 690, the fraction of intergranular (IG) fracture was obtained from fractography. In contrast to the change in the dislocation density with strain-hardening, the fraction of IG fracture increased remarkably when strain-hardened over 20%. From the results, it was suggested that the PWSCC growth behavior of strain-hardened Alloy 690 not only depends on the dislocation density, but also on the microstructural defects at the GB.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.13-19
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• 2018

In this study, the lightweight design of butterfly valve disc component for power plant based on topology optimization was performed. Here, commercial finite element (FE) analysis software was used. The external shape of the basic disc model was not deformed, and the internal element density was removed to make it lightweight. Optimal design was performed each other after the disc plate and two brackets attached on the surface of the disc were separated. Once the optimal shapes were selected, they were assembled to build up the 3-D lightweight valve disc model. After applying pressure to this model, FE analysis was performed to confirm the structural safety.