• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.14-20
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• 2019

This paper presents a safety assessment based approach for the safe operation for PCS(Power Conditioning System) of photovoltaic and energy storage systems, applying FTA. The approach established top events as power outage and a failure likely to cause the largest damage among the potential risks of PCS. Then the Minimal Cut Set (MCS) and the importance of basic events were analyzed for implementing risk assessment. To cope with the objects, the components and their functions of PCS were categorized. To calculate the MCS frequency based on IEEE J Photovolt 2013, IEEE Std. 493-2007 and RAC (EPRD, NPRD), the failure rate and failure mode were produced regarding the basic events. In order to analyze the top event of failure and power outage, it was assumed that failures occurred in DC breaker, AC breaker, SMPS, DC filter, Inverter, CT, PT, DSP board, HMI, AC reactor, MC and EMI filter and Fault Tree was drawn. It is expected that the MCS and the importance of basic event resulting from this study will help find and remove the causes of failure and power outage in PCS for efficient safety management.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.225-233
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• 2012

The research discusses interrelationship of structural and reliability importance measures which used in the probabilistic safety assessment. The most frequently used component importance measures, such as Birnbaum's Importance (BI), Risk Reduction (RR), Risk Reduction Worth (RRW), RA (Risk Achievement), Risk Achievement Worth (RAW), Fussel Vesely (FV) and Critically Importance (CI) can be derived from two structure importance measures that are developed based on the size and the number of Minimal Path Set (MPS) and Minimal Cut Set (MCS). In order to show an effectiveness of importance measures which is developed in this paper, the three representative functional structures, such as series-parallel, k out of n and bridge are used to compare with Birnbaum's Importance measure. In addition, the study presents the implementation examples of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) metrics and alternating renewal process models with exponential distribution to calculate the availability and unavailability of component facility for improving system performances. System state structure functions in terms of component states can be converted into the system availability (unavailability) functions by substituting the component reliabilities (unavailabilities) for the component states. The applicable examples are presented in order to help the understanding of practitioners.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.711-718
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• 2019

BDD is a well-known alternative to the conventional Boolean logic method in fault tree analysis. As the size of fault tree increases, the calculation time and computer resources for BDD dramatically increase. A new failure path search and path restructure method is proposed for efficient calculation of CS and MCS from BDD. Failure path grouping and bottom-up path search is proved to be efficient in failure path search in BDD and path restructure is also proved to be used in order to reduce the number of CS comparisons for MCS extraction. With these newly proposed methods, the top event probability can be calculated using the probability by ASDMP(Approximate Sum of Disjoint MCS Products), which is shown to be equivalent to the result by the conventional MCUB(Minimal Cut Upper Bound) probability.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.342-347
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• 2009

Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is one of most widely used methods in modern engineering system to investigate potential failure modes and its severity upon the system. While performing FMECA, the experts evaluates criticality and severity of each failure mode and visualize the risk level matrix putting those indices to column and row variable respectably. Which results uncertainty in the result. In order to handle the uncertainty and conclude risk level matrix, this paper proposes a new FMECA procedure using minimal cut set (MCS) and fuzzy theory. Severity is calculated by proposed structural importance while criticality is determined by typical equipment failure rate data from IEEE Std 493. Finally, the risk level is compounded of these indices.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.45-53
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• 2011

The research proposes seven elimination rules of redundant gates and blocks in Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Reliability Block Diagram (RBD). The computational complexity of cut sets and path sets is NP-hard. In order to reduce the complexity of Minimal Cut Set (MCS) and Minimal Path Set (MPS), the paper classifies generation algorithms. Moreover, the study develops six implementation steps which reflect structural importance (SI) and reliability importance (RI) from Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) that a priority of using the functional logic among components is to reduce (improve) the system unavailability (or availability). The proposed steps include efficient generation of state structure function by Rare Event Enumeration (REA). Effective use of importance measures, such as SI and ill measures, is presented based on the number and the size of MCS and MPS which is generated from the reference[5] of this paper. In addition, numerical examples are presented for practitioners to obtain the comprehensive understanding of six steps that is proposed in this research.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2017

In this paper, from making an electrical fire which is thought to be the most damaging among potential dangers as a top event, minimal cut sets (MCS) about it were analyzed. For this, components of a power substation were classified into 15 items. Failure rates and modes were extracted based on Korea Electrical Safety Corporation, IEEE Gold Book, and RAC. To analyze the top event (an electrical fire), main events were assorted into "safety devices for overcurrent" and "ampere meter of detecter". Failure of components was divided into failure of VCB, COS, and MCCB. A fault tree was composed of 3 AND gate, 5 OR gates and 17 basic events. Overlapped events among the basic events are things which occur from relevant components. They were attached to the tree by distinguishing identifiers. In case of FT, two minimal cut sets of "IO_METER", "MF_METER", "DO_MCCB" and "IO_METER", "MF_METER", "DO_VCB" take 46% of electrical fires. Therefore, about basic events which are included in the top two minimum cut sets, strict control is necessary.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.110-116
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• 2022

Human failure event (HFE) dependency analysis is a part of human reliability analysis (HRA). For efficient HFE dependency analysis, a maximum number of minimal cut sets (MCSs) that have HFE combinations are generated from the fault trees for the probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of nuclear power plants (NPPs). After collecting potential HFE combinations, dependency levels of subsequent HFEs on the preceding HFEs in each MCS are analyzed and assigned as conditional probabilities. Then, HFE recovery is performed to reflect these conditional probabilities in MCSs by modifying MCSs. Inappropriate HFE dependency analysis and HFE recovery might lead to an inaccurate core damage frequency (CDF). Using the above process, HFE recovery is performed on MCSs that are generated with a non-zero truncation limit, where many MCSs that have HFE combinations are truncated. As a result, the resultant CDF might be underestimated. In this paper, a new method is suggested to incorporate HFE recovery into the MCS generation stage. Compared to the current approach with a separate HFE recovery after MCS generation, this new method can (1) reduce the total time and burden for MCS generation and HFE recovery, (2) prevent the truncation of MCSs that have dependent HFEs, and (3) avoid CDF underestimation. This new method is a simple but very effective means of performing MCS generation and HFE recovery simultaneously and improving CDF accuracy. The effectiveness and strength of the new method are clearly demonstrated and discussed with fault trees and HFE combinations that have joint probabilities.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.12-19
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• 2021

This paper presents a safety assessment method for FTA-based induction heating systems; the failures and causes of electrical fire are first analyzed for each part and module qualitatively, and methods to manage high probabilities of failure and electrical fire are considered, thereby improving the reliability of the induction heating system. The cumulative importance value (ACC) of the minimal cut set is drawn by setting failure as the top event, and STACK and SMPS are observed to account for about 70% of the induction heating system failures. Thus, intensively managing the basic events contained in the minimal cut set of failures for STACK and SMPS is expected to provide effective and stable operation of the induction heating system. When electrical fire is set as the top event, the STACK percentage is 90%. Accordingly, the current IGBT is changed to a FET to increase the applied voltage and prevent induction heating system failure, and a heat sink plane is installed to prevent FET heating caused by switching, thereby preventing an electrical fire. By classifying the parts and modules of the induction heating system in detail and by applying FTA based on actual failure rates and relevant data, more practical and reasonable results may be expected. Hence, continuous research must be conducted to ensure safety when using induction heating systems.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.63-68
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• 2009

The urgent VAI 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 VAI methodology is developed to (1) make a sabotage model by reusing existing fire/flooding/pipe break PSA models, (2) calculate MCSs and TEPSs, (3) select the most cost-effective TEPS among many TEPSs, (4) determine the compartments in a selected TEPS as vital areas, and (5) provide protection measures to the vital areas. The developed VAI methodology contains four steps, (1) collecting the internal level 1 PSA model and information, (2) developing the fire/flood/pipe rupture model based on level 1 PSA model, (3) integrating the fire/flood/pipe rupture model into the sabotage model by JSTAR, and (4) calculating MCSs and TEPS. The VAT process is performed through the VIPEX that was developed in KAERI. This methodology serves as a guide to develop a sabotage model by using existing internal and external PSA models. When this methodology is used to identify the vital areas, it provides the most cost-effective method to save the VAI and physical protection costs.