• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.437-446
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• 2011

Siting criteria for nuclear power plants require that faults be characterized as to their potential for generating earthquakes, or that the absence of the potential for these occurrences be demonstrated. Because the definition of active faults in Korea has been applied by the deterministic method, which depends on the numerical age of fault movement, the possibility of inherent uncertainties exists in determining the maximum earthquake from the fault sources for seismic design. In an attempt to overcome these problems this study suggests new criteria and a probabilistic quantitative diagnostic procedure that could estimate whether a fault is capable of generating earthquakes in the near future.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1406-1416
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• 2017

In complex and large-scale industries, properly designed fault detection and identification (FDI) systems considerably improve safety, reliability and availability of target processes. In thermal power plants (TPPs), generating units operate under very dangerous conditions; system failures can cause severe loss of life and property. In this paper, we propose a bagged auto-associative kernel regression (AAKR)-based FDI approach for steam boilers in TPPs. AAKR estimates new query vectors by online local modeling, and is suitable for TPPs operating under various load levels. By combining the bagging method, more stable and reliable estimations can be achieved, since the effects of random fluctuations decrease because of ensemble averaging. To validate performance, the proposed method and comparison methods (i.e., a clustering-based method and principal component analysis) are applied to failure data due to water wall tube leakage gathered from a 250 MW coal-fired TPP. Experimental results show that the proposed method fulfills reasonable false alarm rates and, at the same time, achieves better fault detection performance than the comparison methods. After performing fault detection, contribution analysis is carried out to identify fault variables; this helps operators to confirm the types of faults and efficiently take preventive actions.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.329-336
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• 2008

The facilities with new technologies in the recent power plants become larger and need a lot of high cost for maintenance due to stop operations and accidents from the operating machines. Therefore, it claims new systems to monitor the operating status and predict the faults of the machines. This research classifies the normal/abnormal status of the machines into 5 levels which are normal-level/abnormal-level/care-level/dangerous-level/fault and develops the new system that predicts faults without stop operation in power plants. We propose the regional segmentation technique in the frequency domain from the data of the operating machines and generate the Peak-codes similar to the Bar-codes, The high efficient and economic operations of the power plants will be achieved by carrying out the pre-maintenance at the care level of 5 levels in the plants. In order to be utilized easily at power plants, we developed the algorithm appling to a notebook computer from signal acquisition to the discrimination.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.100-106
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• 2015

A module or independent subtree is a part of a fault tree whose child gates or basic events are not repeated in the remaining part of the fault tree. Modules are necessarily employed in order to reduce the computational costs of fault tree quantification. This quantification generates fault tree solutions such as minimal cut sets, minimal path sets, or binary decision diagrams (BDDs), and then, calculates top event probability and importance measures. This paper presents a new linear time algorithm to detect modules of large fault trees. It is shown through benchmark tests that the new method proposed in this study can very quickly detect the modules of a huge fault tree. It is recommended that this method be implemented into fault tree solvers for efficient probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of nuclear power plants.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.2096-2106
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• 2023

Rotating machinery is widely applied in important equipment of nuclear power plants (NPPs), such as pumps and valves. The research on intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is crucial to ensure the safe operation of related equipment in NPPs. However, in practical applications, data-driven fault diagnosis faces the problem of small and imbalanced samples, resulting in low model training efficiency and poor generalization performance. Therefore, a deep convolutional conditional generative adversarial network (DCCGAN) is constructed to mitigate the impact of imbalanced samples on fault diagnosis. First, a conditional generative adversarial model is designed based on convolutional neural networks to effectively augment imbalanced samples. The original sample features can be effectively extracted by the model based on conditional generative adversarial strategy and appropriate number of filters. In addition, high-quality generated samples are ensured through the visualization of model training process and samples features. Then, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is designed to extract features of mixed samples and implement intelligent fault diagnosis. Finally, based on multi-fault experimental data of motor and bearing, the performance of DCCGAN model for data augmentation and intelligent fault diagnosis is verified. The proposed method effectively alleviates the problem of imbalanced samples, and shows its application value in intelligent fault diagnosis of actual NPPs.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.849-858
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• 2009

Risk caused by safety-critical instrumentation and control (I&C) systems considerably affects overall plant risk. As digitalization of safety-critical systems in nuclear power plants progresses, a risk model of a digitalized safety system is required and must be included in a plant safety model in order to assess this risk effect on the plant. Unique features of a digital system cause some challenges in risk modeling. This article aims at providing an overview of the issues related to the development of a static fault-tree-based risk model. We categorize the complicated issues of digital system probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) into four groups based on their characteristics: hardware module issues, software issues, system issues, and safety function issues. Quantification of the effect of these issues dominates the quality of a developed risk model. Recent research activities for addressing various issues, such as the modeling framework of a software-based system, the software failure probability and the fault coverage of a self monitoring mechanism, are discussed. Although these issues are interrelated and affect each other, the categorized and systematic approach suggested here will provide a proper insight for analyzing risk from a digital system.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.6 no.11
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• pp.968-973
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• 2000

Fault diagnosis plays an important role in the performance and safe operation of many modern engineering plants. This paper investigates the problem of fault detection using neural networks in dynamic systems. A general framework for constructing a nonlinear fault detection scheme for nonlinear dynamic systems containing modeling uncertaintly is proposed. The main idea behind the proposed approach is to monitor the physical system with an off -line learning neural network and then to approximate the upper and lower thresholds of acceleration of the nominal system with the model-based threshold(ThMB) method, The performance of the proposed fault detection scheme is investigated through simulations of a pendulum with uncertainty.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.81-86
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• 1997

This study is to estimate the possibility of accident in chemical plants from the analysis of system component which affects the occurrence of top event. Among the various risk assessment techniques, the Fault Tree Analysis which approaches deductively on the route of accident development was used in this study. By gate-by-gate method and minimal cut set, the qualitative and quantitative risk assessment for hazards in plants was performed. The probability of occurrence and frequency of top event was calculated from failure or reliability data of system components at stage of the quantitative risk assessment. In conclusion, the probability of accident was estimated according to logic pattern based on the Fault Tree Analysis. And the failure path which mostly influences on the occurrence of top event was found from Importance Analysis.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.160-171
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• 2017

US national research laboratories developed the first Vital Area Identification (VAI) method for the physical protection of nuclear power plants that is based on Event Tree Analysis (ETA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) techniques in 1970s. Then, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute proposed advanced VAI method that takes advantage of fire and flooding Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) results. In this study, in order to minimize the burden and difficulty of VAI, (1) a set of streamlined VAI rules were developed, and (2) this set of rules was applied to PSA fault tree and event tree at the initial stage of VAI process. This new rule-based VAI method is explained, and its efficiency and correctness are demonstrated throughout this paper. This new rule-based VAI method drastically reduces problem size by (1) performing PSA event tree simplification by applying VAI rules to the PSA event tree, (2) calculating preliminary prevention sets with event tree headings, (3) converting the shortest preliminary prevention set into a sabotage fault tree, and (4) performing usual VAI procedure. Since this new rule-based VAI method drastically reduces VAI problem size, it provides very quick and economical VAI procedure. In spite of an extremely reduced sabotage fault tree, this method generates identical vital areas to those by traditional VAI method. It is strongly recommended that this new rule-based VAI method be applied to the physical protection of nuclear power plants and other complex safety-critical systems such as chemical and military systems.