• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.327-334
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• 2017

Common-cause failure (CCF) events can significantly impact the availability of safety systems of nuclear power plants. For this reason, the International Common Cause Data Exchange (ICDE) project was initiated by several countries in 1994. Since 1997 it has been operated within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) framework and has successfully been operated over six consecutive terms (the current term being 2015-2017). The ICDE project allows multiple countries to collaborate and exchange CCF data to enhance the quality of risk analyses, which include CCF modeling. As CCF events are typically rare, most countries do not experience enough CCF events to perform meaningful analyses. Data combined from several countries, however, have yielded sufficient data for more rigorous analyses. The ICDE project has meanwhile published 11 reports on the collection and analysis of CCF events of specific component types (centrifugal pumps, emergency diesel generators, motor operated valves, safety and relief valves, check valves, circuit breakers, level measurement, control rod drive assemblies, and heat exchangers) and two topical reports. This paper presents recent activities and lessons learnt from the data collection and the results of topical analysis on emergency diesel generator CCF impacting entire exposed population.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.70 no.1
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• pp.81-96
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• 2019

In this paper, a hybrid uncertain model is applied to system reliability based design optimization (RBDO) of trusses. All random variables are described by random distributions but some key distribution parameters of them which lack information are defined by variation intervals. For system RBDO of trusses, the first order reliability method, as well as monotonicity analysis and the branch and bound method, are utilized to determine the system failure probability; and Improved (${\mu}+{\lambda}$) constrained differential evolution (ICDE) is employed for the optimization process. System reliability assessment of several numerical examples and system RBDO of different truss structures are proposed to verify our results. Moreover, the effect of different classes of interval distribution parameters on the optimum weight of the structure and the reliability index are also investigated. The results indicate that the weight of the structure is increased by increasing the uncertainty level. Moreover, it is shown that for a certain random variable, the optimum weight is more increased by the translation interval parameters than the rotation ones.