• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.319-328
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• 2010

Bonded tendons have been used in reactor buildings at some operating nuclear power plants in Korea. Assessing prestress force on these bonded tendons has become an important pending problem in efforts to assure continued operation beyond their design life. The System Identification (SI) technique was thus developed to improve upon the existing indirect assessment technique for bonded tendons. As a first step, this study analyzed the sensitivity of the key parameters to prestress force, and then determined the optimal parameters for the SI technique. A total of six scaled post-tensioned concrete beams with bonded tendons were manufactured. In order to investigate the correlation of the natural frequency and the displacement to prestress force, an impact test, a Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) sine sweep test, and a bending test using an optical fiber sensor and compact displacement transducer were carried out. These tests found that both the natural frequency and the displacement show a good correlation with prestress force and that both parameters are available for the SI technique to predict prestress force. However, displacements by the optical fiber sensor and compact displacement transducer were shown to be more sensitive than the natural frequency to prestress force. Such displacements are more useful than the natural frequency as an input parameter for the SI technique.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.3
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• pp.715-731
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• 2021

Uncertainties are calculated for pressurized water reactor (PWR) spent nuclear fuel (SNF) characteristics. The deterministic code STREAM is currently being used as an SNF analysis tool to obtain isotopic inventory, radioactivity, decay heat, neutron and gamma source strengths. The SNF analysis capability of STREAM was recently validated. However, the uncertainty analysis is yet to be conducted. To estimate the uncertainty due to nuclear data, STREAM is used to perturb nuclear cross section (XS) and resonance integral (RI) libraries produced by NJOY99. The perturbation of XS and RI involves the stochastic sampling of ENDF/B-VII.1 covariance data. To estimate the uncertainty due to modeling parameters (fuel design and irradiation history), surrogate models are built based on polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) and variance-based sensitivity indices (i.e., Sobol' indices) are employed to perform global sensitivity analysis (GSA). The calculation results indicate that uncertainty of SNF due to modeling parameters are also very important and as a result can contribute significantly to the difference of uncertainties due to nuclear data and modeling parameters. In addition, the surrogate model offers a computationally efficient approach with significantly reduced computation time, to accurately evaluate uncertainties of SNF integral characteristics.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1571-1584
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• 2023

In this study, a numerical analysis was performed as part of an international joint research project to reproduce a real cable tray fire that occurred in the heater bay area of the turbine building of a nuclear power plant. A sensitivity analysis was performed on various input parameters to derive results consistent with the sprinkler activation time obtained from the fire event analysis. For all sensitive parameters, the normalized sprinkler activation time correlated well with the power function of the normalized sprinkler height. A correlation equation was developed to identify the sprinkler activation time at any location when determining the slope or fire growth rate under the conditions assuming a linear or t-squared heat release rate (HRR) time curve. Various cable fire growth assumptions were used to determine which assumption was better to provide the prediction coincident with the information given from the fire event analysis in terms of the sprinkler activation time and total energy generated from cables damaged by fire. In the comprehensive analysis of all the sensitive parameters, the standard deviation of the input parameters increased as the sprinkler height decreased. Within the range of the sensitivity parameter values given in this study, when considering all sprinkler heights, the standard deviation of the cable model change was the largest and that of the overhang position change was the smallest.

• Coupled systems mechanics
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.429-444
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• 2023

The comprehension and structural modeling of masonry constructions is fundamental to safeguard the integrity of built cultural assets and intervene through adequate actions, especially in earthquake-prone regions. Despite the availability of several modeling strategies and modern computing power, modeling masonry remains a great challenge because of still demanding computational efforts, constraints in performing destructive or semi-destructive in-situ tests, and material uncertainties. This paper investigates the shear behavior of masonry walls by applying a plane-stress FE continuum model with the Modified Masonry-like Material (MMLM). Epistemic uncertainty affecting input parameters of the MMLM is considered in a probabilistic framework. After appointing a suitable probability density function to input quantities according to prior engineering knowledge, uncertainties are propagated to outputs relying on gPCE-based surrogate models to considerably speed up the forward problem-solving. The sensitivity of the response to input parameters is evaluated through the computation of Sobol' indices pointing out the parameters more worthy to be further investigated, when dealing with the seismic assessment of masonry buildings. Finally, masonry mechanical properties are calibrated in a probabilistic setting with the Bayesian approach to the inverse problem based on the available measurements obtained from the experimental load-displacement curves provided by shear compression in-situ tests.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.1B
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• pp.21-32
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• 2008

Flood forecasting is a very important tool as one of nonstructural measures for reduction of flood damages in life and property and its accuracy is also an important factor. However, when we apply the Storage Function Model(SFM) which is mainly used for the flood forecasting system in Korea, the determination of the parameters is very important but it is difficult. So, the parameters have been calibrated by using an empirical formulas and judgement of hydrologist. Hence, in this study we perform the sensitivity analysis to understand the parameter characteristics and establish the ranges of parameters of the SFM. Also we do the parameter calibration by using the optimization techniques and objective functions, and evaluate their performances. Especially, we suggest a method to determine proper parameters by using a objective function which can be obtained from flood events. So, we use the suggested method for parameter estimation and compare the estimated parameters with the previously reported parameters. As a result of the application, the estimated parameters by the suggested method showed better than them from the previously reported parameters.

• Journal of Power System Engineering
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.110-116
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• 2009

In the present study, we proposed a simulation model of vacuum booster with AMESIM software to predict the output characteristic. And we performed the sensitivity analysis of output characteristic with main design parameters, such as diaphragm diameter. All of these parameters are main design parameters in the procedure of vacuum booster design. The simulation results of this paper offer qualitative information of vacuum booster output. Therefore, the simulation results of this paper will be used effectively for the design procedure of vacuum booster in the industrial field.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.337-342
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• 1989

Since the late 1960s, the selection of the parameters of power system stabilizer (PSS) to damp out sustained low frequency oscillation of power generators in the steady state has been an active research area. This paper presents a new approach to select the optimal PSS parameters using the sensitivity of the quadratic performance with respect to the PSS parameters. The proposed algorithm has been applied to Seo-Cheon fossil power plant.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.187-194
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• 2014

We consider a Bayesian nonignorable selection model to accommodate the selection bias. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods is known to be very useful to fit the nonignorable selection model. However, sensitivity to prior assumptions on parameters for selection mechanism is a potential problem. To quantify the sensitivity to prior assumption, the deviance information criterion and the conditional predictive ordinate are used to compare the goodness-of-fit under two different prior specifications. It turns out that the 'MLE' prior gives better fit than the 'uniform' prior in viewpoints of goodness-of-fit measures.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.335-347
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• 2016

One of major errors in flow rate measurement for two-phase flow using an Electrical Capacitance Sensor (ECS) concerns sensor sensitivity under temperature raise. The thermal effect on electrical capacitance sensor (ECS) system for air-water two-phase flow monitoring include sensor sensitivity, capacitance measurements, capacitance change and node potential distribution is reported in this paper. The rules of 12-electrode sensor parameters such as capacitance, capacitance change, and change rate of capacitance and sensitivity map the basis of Air-water two-phase flow permittivity distribution and temperature raise are discussed by ANSYS and MATLAB, which are combined to simulate sensor characteristic. The cross-sectional void fraction as a function of temperature is determined from the scripting capabilities in ANSYS simulation. The results show that the temperature raise had a detrimental effect on the electrodes sensitivity and sensitive domain of electrodes. The FE results are in excellent agreement with an experimental result available in the literature, thus validating the accuracy and reliability of the proposed flow rate measurement system.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1990.11a
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• pp.19-22
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• 1990

In this paper, in order to reduce the cogging torque in a permanent motor, a method to optimize the shape of permanent magnet and iron pole is presented. Because the cogging torque comes from the irregular system energy variation according to the rotor position, system energy variation is taken as object function and the object function is minimized to optimize the shape. The positions of permanent magnet surface and iron pole surface are chosen as design parameters and sensitivity of object function with respect to design parameter is calculated. The shape is changed according to sensitivity. Sensitivity can be generated by methods that exploit the FEM formulation. A numerical example shows that about 90% of the original cogging torque is reduced.