• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
• /
• v.19 no.10
• /
• pp.1835-1845
• /
• 2005

In this paper a safe arm with passive compliant joints and visco-elastic covering is designed for human-friendly service robots. The passive compliant joint (PCJ) is composed of a magneto-rheological (MR) damper and a rotary spring. In addition to a spring component, a damper is introduced for damping effect and works as a rotary viscous damper by controlling the electric current according to the angular velocity of spring displacement. When a manipulator interacts with human or environment, the joints and cover passively operate and attenuate the applied collision force. The force attenuation property is verified through collision experiments showing that the proposed passive arm is safe in view of some evaluation measures.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2003.10a
• /
• pp.2010-2015
• /
• 2003

In this paper, a design and control of the safe arm with passive compliant joints(PCJ) is presented. Each PCJ has a magneto- rheological damper and maximum 6 springs. Compliance analysis in Cartesian space is performed with the compliance ellipsoid; this analysis shows a map between compliance in the joint space and compliance in Cartesian space. Vibration control of the arm using an input shaping technique is also presented; the results of a simulation and an experiment prove that a fast motion of the safe arm without residual vibration can be performed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.45 no.5
• /
• pp.625-636
• /
• 2013

Pressing demands of economic competitiveness, the need for large-scale deployment, minimizing the need of human intervention, and experience from the past events and incidents at operating reactors have guided the evolution and innovations in reactor technologies. Indian innovative reactor 'AHWR' is a pressure-tube type natural circulation based boiling water reactor that is designed to meet such requirements, which essentially reflect the needs of next generation reactors. The reactor employs various passive features to prevent and mitigate accidental conditions, like a slightly negative void reactivity coefficient, passive poison injection to scram the reactor in event of failure of the wired shutdown systems, a large elevated pool of water as a heat sink inside the containment, passive decay heat removal based on natural circulation and passive valves, passive ECC injection, etc. It is designed to meet the fundamental safety requirements of safe shutdown, safe decay heat removal and confinement of activity with no impact in public domain, and hence, no need for emergency planning under all conceivable scenarios. This paper examines the role of the various passive safety systems in prevention and mitigation of severe plant conditions that may arise in event of multiple failures. For the purpose of demonstration of the effectiveness of its passive features, postulated scenarios on the lines of three major severe accidents in the history of nuclear power reactors are considered, namely; the Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents. Severe plant conditions along the lines of these scenarios are postulated to the extent conceivable in the reactor under consideration and analyzed using best estimate system thermal-hydraulics code RELAP5/Mod3.2. It is found that the various passive systems incorporated enable the reactor to tolerate the postulated accident conditions without causing severe plant conditions and core degradation.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.55 no.12
• /
• pp.4335-4349
• /
• 2023

Nuclear marine propulsion has been emerging as a next generation carbon-free power source, for which proper passive residual heat removal systems (PRHRSs) are needed for long-term safety. In particular, the characteristics of unlimited operation time and compact design are crucial in maritime applications due to the difficulties of safety aids and limited space. Accordingly, a compact and long-term-operable PRHRS has been proposed with the key design concept of using both air cooling and seawater cooling in tandem. To confirm its feasibility, this study conducted system design and a transient analysis in an accident scenario. Design results indicate that seawater cooling can considerably reduce the overall system size, and thus the compact and long-term-operable PRHRS can be realized. Regarding the transient analysis, the Multi-dimensional Analysis of Reactor Safety (MARS-KS) code was used to analyze the system behavior under a station blackout condition. Results show that the proposed design can satisfy the design requirements with a sufficient margin: the coolant temperature reached the safe shutdown condition within 36 h, and the maximum cooling rate did not exceed 40 ℃/h. Lastly, it was assessed that both air cooling and seawater cooling are necessary for achieving long-term operation and compact design.

• Earthquakes and Structures
• /
• v.11 no.6
• /
• pp.1001-1025
• /
• 2016

Building structures generally have inherent low damping capability and hence are vulnerable to seismic excitations. Control devices therefore play a useful role in providing safety to building structures subject to seismic events. In recent years semi-active dampers have gained considerable attention as structural control devices in the building construction industry. Magneto-rheological (MR) damper, a type of semi-active damper has proven to be effective in seismic mitigation of building structures. MR dampers contain a controllable MR fluid whose rheological properties vary rapidly with the applied magnetic field. Although some research has been carried out on the use of MR dampers in building structures, optimal design of MR damper and combined use of MR and passive dampers for real scale buildings has hardly been investigated. This paper investigates the use of MR dampers and incorporating MR-passive damper combinations in building structures in order to achieve acceptable levels of seismic performance. In order to do so, it first develops the MR damper model by integrating control algorithms commonly used in MR damper modelling. The developed MR damper is then integrated in to the seismically excited structure as a time domain function. Linear and nonlinear structure models are evaluated in real time scenarios. Analyses are conducted to investigate the influence of location and number of devices on the seismic performance of the building structure. The findings of this paper provide information towards the design and construction of earthquake safe buildings with optimally employed MR dampers and MR-passive damper combinations.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
• /
• v.11 no.1 s.34
• /
• pp.13-17
• /
• 2007

It is very insecure to treat a butane can for cooking out of door. The human injury from the accidents of butane cans has been getting increased 1.5 times yearly since 2003. In this context, the Institute of Gas Technology Training in Korea Gas Safety Corporation carries out explosion experiment to make trainees to take all possible measures to ensure safe management of gas in the field by fully recognizing the hazards of gas explosion accidents. This study intends to examine the influence of such explosion experiments on the trainees witnessing nearby. The GEN exposed to the active students participating in the experiment away from 25 meters from the explosion site was 57.94 dB and the GEN to the passive students not participating away from 50 meters was 51.92 dB. According to Weber-Fechner's law for the lower value than 65 dB which is the environmental standard, it is safe from the place 15 meter far from the explosion place. The environmental standard of offices is 50 dB, and it is lower than the environmental standard if the office is 65 meter far from the explosion place.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.55 no.6
• /
• pp.2047-2052
• /
• 2023

Risk-informed approach has been widely applied in the safety design, regulation, and operation of nuclear reactors. It has been commonly accepted that risk-informed design optimization should be used in the innovative reactor designs to make nuclear system highly safe and reliable. In spite of the risk-informed approach has been used in some advanced nuclear reactors designs, such as Westinghouse IRIS, Gen-IV sodium fast reactors and lead-based fast reactors, the process of risk-informed design of nuclear reactors is hardly to carry out when passive system reliability should be integrated in the framework. A practical method for new passive safety reactors based on probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) and passive system reliability analyze linking is proposed in this paper. New three-dimension frequency-consequence curve based on risk concept with three variables is used in this method. The proposed method has been applied to the determination optimization of design options selection in a 10 MWth lead-based research reactor(LR) to obtain one optimized system design in conceptual design stage, using the integrated reliability and probabilistic safety assessment program RiskA, and the computation resources and time consumption in this process was demonstrated reasonable and acceptable.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.55 no.6
• /
• pp.2088-2095
• /
• 2023

The safety of nuclear installations is largely determined by the tightness of fuel elements cladding. As the Fukushima nuclear accident showed, the main task in case of loss of power supply is to ensure reliable removal of residual heat release from spent fuel pool (SFP) with irradiated fuel assemblies (IFAs). The paper presents the results of calculated-experimental studies and thermal-hydraulic modeling of temperature storage modes of IFAs in SFP. Experimental studies of SFP's temperature regime and calculated evaluation of residual heat removal due to the thermal conductivity of building structures surrounding the SFP were performed. To ensure the safe operation of research reactors, it's necessary to know the IFA's residual heat power (RHP) in the reactor and SFP, which is determined depending on the operating time of fuel assemblies (FAs) and the IFAs calculated holding time. The FAs operating time depends on the reactor energy output. The IFAs calculated holding time is determined by the fuel burnup, U-235 mass in the fuel, and reactor utilization factor. The IFAs fuel burnup was calculated using the MCU-PTR program. Also presented are the RHP's calculation results using some of the empirical dependencies. The concept of a passive heat removal system (PHRS) based on thermosyphon's operating principle was proposed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.49 no.5
• /
• pp.953-967
• /
• 2017

In this paper, a complete station blackout (SBO) or complete loss of electrical power supplies is simulated and analyzed in a downward cooling 5-MW pool-type Material Testing Reactor (MTR). The scenario is traced in the absence of active cooling systems and operators. The code nodalization is successfully benchmarked against experimental data of the reactor's operating parameters. The passive heat removal system includes downward water cooling after pump breakdown by the force of gravity (where the coolant streams down to the unfilled portion of the holdup tank), safety flapper opening, flow reversal from a downward to an upward cooling direction, and then the upward free convection heat removal throughout the flapper safety valve, lower plenum, and fuel assemblies. Both short-term and long-term natural core cooling conditions are simulated and investigated using the RELAP5 code. Short-term analyses focus on the safety flapper valve operation and flow reversal mode. Long-term analyses include simulation of both complete SBO and long-term operation of the free convection mode. Results are promising for pool-type MTRs because this allows operators to investigate RELAP code abilities for MTR thermal-hydraulic simulations without any oscillation; moreover, the Tehran Research Reactor is conservatively safe against the complete SBO and long-term free convection operation.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.287-297
• /
• 2015

A railway security detection system is very important. There are many safety factors that directly affect the safe operation of trains. Security detection technology can be divided into passive and active approaches. In this paper, we will first survey the railway security systems and compare them. We will also propose a subway security detection system with computer vision technology, which can detect three kinds of problems: the spark problem, the obstacle problem, and the lost screw problem. The spark and obstacle detection methods are unique in our system. In our experiment using about 900 input test images, we obtained about a 99.8% performance in F- measure for the spark detection problem, and about 94.7% for the obstacle detection problem.