• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.107-115
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• 2018

To ensure the structural integrity of nuclear power plants, it is essential to predict the lifetime of Alloy 182 weld, which is used for welding in nuclear reactors. The lifetime of Alloy 182 weld is directly related to the crack initiation time. Owing to the large time scatter in most crack initiation tests, a probabilistic model, such as the Weibull distribution, has mainly been adopted for prediction. However, since statistically more advanced methods than current typical methods may be applied, we suggest a statistical procedure for parameter estimation of the crack initiation time of Alloy 182 weld, considering right-censored data and the covariate effect. Furthermore, we suggest a procedure for uncertainty evaluation of the estimators based on the bootstrap method. The suggested statistical procedure can be applied not only to Alloy 182 weld but also to any material degradation data set including right-censored data with covariate effect.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.11
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• pp.2678-2685
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• 2020

The pipe bends and elbows in nuclear power plants (NPPs) are vulnerable to degradation mechanisms and can cause wall-thinning defects. As it is difficult to detect both the defects generated inside the wall-thinned pipes and the preliminary signs, the wall-thinning defects should be accurately estimated to maintain the integrity of NPPs. This paper proposes a deep fuzzy neural network (DFNN) method and estimates the collapse moment of wall-thinned pipe bends and elbows. The proposed model has a simplified structure in which the fuzzy neural network module is repeatedly connected, and it is optimized using the least squares method and genetic algorithm. Numerical data obtained through simulations on the pipe bends and elbows with extrados, intrados, and crown defects were applied to the DFNN model to estimate the collapse moment. The acquired databases were divided into training, optimization, and test datasets and used to train and verify the estimation model. Consequently, the relative root mean square (RMS) errors of the estimated collapse moment at all the defect locations were within 0.25% for the test data. Such a low RMS error indicates that the DFNN model is accurate in estimating the collapse moment for wall-thinned pipe bends and elbows.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.817-824
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• 2017

Residual stress is a critical element in determining the integrity of parts and the lifetime of welded structures. It is necessary to estimate the residual stress of a welding zone because residual stress is a major reason for the generation of primary water stress corrosion cracking in nuclear power plants. That is, it is necessary to estimate the distribution of the residual stress in welding of dissimilar metals under manifold welding conditions. In this study, a cascaded support vector regression (CSVR) model was presented to estimate the residual stress of a welding zone. The CSVR model was serially and consecutively structured in terms of SVR modules. Using numerical data obtained from finite element analysis by a subtractive clustering method, learning data that explained the characteristic behavior of the residual stress of a welding zone were selected to optimize the proposed model. The results suggest that the CSVR model yielded a better estimation performance when compared with a classic SVR model.

• KEPCO Journal on Electric Power and Energy
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.241-248
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• 2021

High cycle fatigue life for the cables with two different types of clamps is estimated comparatively through acceleration testing. The high cycle fatigue fracture of overhead lines is caused mainly by the aeolian vibration which is induced by vortex shedding. It is necessary to manage the integrity of cables continuedly considering that the aeolian vibration is unavoidable since it occurs in steady and relatively low wind velocity. Two types of clamps which are largely used for overhead lines of the distribution grids are selected and failure data are obtained by step stress testing with a electrodynamic shaker with them. The inverse power law is assumed to describe the stress-life relationship and the fatigue limit at any specified life is supposed to follow Weibull distribution. The life of the cable is defined as the number of cycles to the time that one of strands is completely broken. Finally, the fatigue limits of the cables with two clamp types are estimated at the reference life of 500 Mcycles and compared each other based on a bending vibration amplitude.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.409-419
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• 2023

Structural integrity can be accessed from dynamic deformations of structures. Moreover, dynamic deformations can be acquired from non-contact sensors such as video cameras. Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) algorithm is one of the commonly used methods for motion tracking. However, averaging throughout the extracted features would induce bias in the measurement. In addition, pixel-wise measurements can be converted to physical units through camera intrinsic. Still, the depth information is unreachable without prior knowledge of the space information. The assigned homogeneous coordinates would then mismatch manually selected feature points, resulting in measurement errors during coordinate transformation. In this study, a two-stage optimization method for video-based measurements is proposed. The manually selected feature points are first optimized by minimizing the errors compared with the homogeneous coordinate. Then, the optimized points are utilized for the KLT algorithm to extract displacements through inverse projection. Two additional criteria are employed to eliminate outliers from KLT, resulting in more reliable displacement responses. The second-stage optimization subsequently fine-tunes the geometry of the selected coordinates. The optimization process also considers the number of interpolation points at different depths of an image to reduce the effect of out-of-plane motions. As a result, the proposed method is numerically investigated by using a truss bridge as a physics-based graphic model (PBGM) to extract high-accuracy displacements from recorded videos under various capturing angles and structural conditions.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2013

Recent years have witnessed a strong need for eco-friendly and energy-efficient systems owing to global environmental problems. A heat exchanger is a well-known mechanical rig that has long been used in many energy systems. The use of a heat exchanger in an airplane engine has been attempted. In this case, the heat exchanger should be redesigned to be compact, lightweight, and highly reliable, and the issue of mechanical integrity gains importance. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a method for evaluating the mechanical integrity of a tube-type heat exchanger. A U-shaped single tube was used as an example, and its behavior and stress distribution were studied using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.40-45
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• 1993

The steam generator tubes of the nuclear power plant should be inspected using eddy current techniques. Recently the crack-like defects become a major concern for the integrity of the steam generator tubes. These defects could be detected by the MRPC(Motorized Rotating Pancake Coil) method, not by the conventional bobbin coil method. In this paper it has been attempted to estimate the length of the cracks at the tube expansion region using of MRPC technique. The lengths of both axial and circumferential cracks show a tendency of overestimation compared to the real lengths. As the depths of the defects decrease from 100% through 50% of the wall thickness, the error of the length estimation is increased.

• IE interfaces
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.422-430
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• 2012

In this article, we introduced the estimation method by 'Safety Integrity Level'(SIL) for the criterion of safety assurance and performed a case study on a flame scanner. SIL requires probabilistic evaluation of each set of equipment used to reduce risk in a safety related system. FMEDA(Failure Modes, Effects and Diagnostic Analysis) method is widely used to evaluate the safety levels and provides information on the failure rates and failure mode distributions necessary to calculate a diagnostic coverage factor for a part or a component. Basically, two parameters resulting from FMEDA are used for SIL classification of the device : SFF(Safe Failure Fraction) and PFD(Probability of Failure on Demand). In this case study, it is concluded that the flame scanner is designed to fulfill the condition of SIL 3 in the aspect of SFF and PFD.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1996.10b
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• pp.1404-1407
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• 1996

A quality monitoring system in butt welding process is proposed to estimate weld pool sizes. The geometrical parameters of the weld pool such as the top bead width and the penetration depth plus half back width are utilized to prove the integrity of the weld quality. The monitoring variables used are the surface temperatures measured at three points on the top surface of the weldment. The temperature profile is assumed that it has a gaussian distribution in vertical direction of torch movement and verify this assumption through temperature analysis. A neural network estimator is designed to estimate weld pool size from temperature informations. The experimental results show that the proposed neural network estimator which used gaussian distribution as temperature information can estimate the weld pool sizes accurately than used three point temperatures as temperature information. Considering the change of gap size in butt welding, the experiment were performed on various gap size.

• Journal of Auto-vehicle Safety Association
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.32-37
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• 2017

For automated vehicles, the integrity and fault tolerance of environment perception sensor have been an important issue. This paper presents radar, vision, lidar(laser radar) fusion-based fault detection algorithm for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, characteristics of each sensor are shown. And the error of states of moving targets estimated by each sensor is analyzed to present the method to detect fault of environment sensors by characteristic of this error. Each estimation of moving targets isperformed by EKF/IMM method. To guarantee the reliability of fault detection algorithm of environment sensor, various driving data in several types of road is analyzed.