• 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.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.45-53
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• 2019

Thermal-hydraulic passive safety systems (PSSs) are incorporated into many advanced reactor designs on the bases of simplicity, economics and inherent safety nature. Several factors among which are the critical parameters (CPs) that influence failure and reliability of thermal-hydraulic (t-h) passive systems are now being explored. For simplicity, it is assumed in most reliability analyses that the CPs are independent whereas in practice this assumption is not always valid. There is need to critically examine the dependency influence of the CPs on reliability of the t-h passive systems at design stage and in operation to guarantee safety/better performance. In this paper, two multivariate analysis methods (covariance and conditional subjective probability density function) were presented and applied to a simple PSS. The methods followed a generalized procedure for evaluating t-h reliability based on dependency consideration. A passively water-cooled steam generator was used to demonstrate the dependency of the identified key CPs using the methods. The results obtained from the methods are in agreement and justified the need to consider the dependency of CPs in t-h reliability. For dependable t-h reliability, it is advisable to adopt all possible CPs and apply suitable multivariate method in dependency consideration of CPs among other factors.

• Journal of Korean Critical Care Nursing
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.44-55
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• 2012

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate perception of patient safety culture and safety care activity among hospital nurses and to identify factors associated with the safety care activity. Methods: A total of 399 nurses working at secondary or tertiary hospitals in B city were participated in. Data were collected using 'Questionnaire on Patient Safety' and 'Safety Care Activity Questionnaire'. Results: The mean score of patient safety culture was 3.41 out of possible 5. The mean score of safety care activity was 4.40 out of possible 5. There was a positive relation between the perception of patient safety culture and the safety care activity. Through stepwise regression analysis with 22.4% of accountability, it was found that the perception of the safety care activity was associated with communication process, a sub-domain of safety culture, marital status, experience of incidence reporting, and level of patient safety. Conclusion: The findings show the importance of communication among nurses to improve the safety care activity. To provide high quality of care for patients, it is necessary to educate nurses on fire safety, patient education, and medication safety and improve their communication skills.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.93-101
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• 2015

The demand from customers on better products and systems seems to be ever increasing. To meet the demand, the systems are becoming more and more complicated in terms of both scale and functionality, thereby requiring enormous effort in the development. One bright spot of this trend is that such effort has been the driving forces of the remarkable advancement in modern systems development. On the other hand, safety issues appear to be critical in many large-scale systems such as transportation and weapon systems including high-speed trains, airplanes, ships, missiles/rockets launchers, and so on. Such systems turn out to be prone to a variety of faults and thus the resultant failure can cause disastrous accidents. For the reason, they can be referred to as safety-critical systems. The systems failure can be attributed to either random or systemic factors (or sometimes both). The objective of this paper is on how to reduce potential systemic failure in safety critical systems. To do so, a proper system design is pursued to minimize the risk of systemic failure. A focus is placed on the fact that complex systems have a lot of complicated interfaces among the system elements. To effectively handle the sources of hazards at the complicated interfaces and resultant failure, a method is developed by utilizing a design structure matrix. As a case study, the developed method is applied in the design of train control systems.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.1-5
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• 2016

A bicycle is one of the most popular sporting goods in view of a sport activity and a human health. Metallic materials such as steel, aluminum, etc. were mainly used to the bicycle fork in the past. Nowadays, the carbon fiber reinforced composite materials are widely used to the manufacturing of a bicycle fork to reduce the weight and to increase the efficiency. Safety is a most important design parameter of a bicycle fork even if the weight and cost reduction are important. Bicycle failure may happen at the critical spot of a bicycle fork and cause the accident. In this paper, the composite bicycle fork will be analyzed to secure the safety and detect a critical spot by using the finite element method with Tsai-Wu failure criterion. The stress data were obtained for the laminated composites with various number of plies and fiber orientation under the bending load. Thus, design concept of a bicycle fork was proposed to secure the safety of a bicycle. The finite element analysis results show that the connection area between a steer tube and a fork blade is critical spot, and 75 or more layers of 0 degree are needed to secure the safety of a bicycle fork.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.1-15
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• 2014

In this study, artificial neural network (ANN) and multiple regression (MR) models were developed to predict the critical factor of safety ($F_s$) of the homogeneous finite slopes subjected to earthquake forces. To achieve this, the values of $F_s$ in 5184 nos. of homogeneous finite slopes having different slope, soil and earthquake parameters were calculated by using the Simplified Bishop method and the minimum (critical) $F_s$ for each of the case was determined and used in the development of the ANN and MR models. The results obtained from both the models were compared with those obtained from the calculations. It is found that the ANN model exhibits more reliable predictions than the MR model. Moreover, several performance indices such as the determination coefficient, variance account for, mean absolute error, root mean square error, and the scaled percent error were computed. Also, the receiver operating curves were drawn, and the areas under the curves (AUC) were calculated to assess the prediction capacity of the ANN and MR models developed. The performance level attained in the ANN model shows that the ANN model developed can be used for predicting the critical $F_s$ of the homogeneous finite slopes subjected to earthquake forces.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.317-322
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• 2017

When the heat flux on the heating surface following changing heat condition in the boiling heat transfer system exceeds critical heat flux, the critical heat flux phenomenon is going over to immediately the film boiling area and then it is occurred the physical destruction phenomenon of various heat transfer systems. In order to maximize the safe operation and performance of the heat transfer system, it is essential to improve the CHF(Critical Heat Flux) of the system. Therefore, we have analysis the effect of improving CHF and characteristics of heat transfer following the nanoparticle coating thickness. As the results, copper nanocoating time are increased to CHF, and in case of nano-coatings are increased spray-deposited coating times more than in the fure water; copper nanopowder is increased up to 6.40%. The boiling heat transfer coefficients of the pure water are increased up to 5.79% respectively. Also, the contact angle is decreased and surface roughness is increased when nano-coating time is increasingly going up.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.40-49
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• 2024

Background: This study aimed to prioritize policy measures to improve radiation safety management in medical institutions using the analytic hierarchy process. Materials and Methods: It adopted three policy options-engineering, education, and enforcement-to categorize safety management measures, the so-called Harvey's 3Es. Then, the radiation safety management measures obtained from the current system and other studies were organized into action plan categories. Using the derived model, this study surveyed 33 stakeholders of radiation safety management in medical institutions and analyzed the importance of each measure. Results and Discussion: As a result, these stakeholders generally identified enforcement as the most important factor for improving the safety management system. The study also found that radiation safety officers and medical physicists perceived different measures as important, indicating clear differences in opinions among stakeholders, especially in improving quality assurance in radiation therapy. Hence, the process of coordination and consensus is likely to be critical in improving the radiation safety management system. Conclusion: Stakeholders in the medical field consider enforcement as the most critical factor in improving their safety management systems. Specifically, the most crucial among the six specific action plans was the "reinforcement of the organization and workforce for safety management," with a relative importance of 25.7%.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.259-276
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• 2006

As the use of digital systems becomes more prevalent, adequate techniques for software specification and analysis have become increasingly important in nuclear power plant (NPP) safety-critical systems. Additionally, the importance of software verification and validation (V&V) based on adequate specification has received greater emphasis in view of improving software quality. For thorough V&V of safety-critical systems, V&V should be performed throughout the software lifecycle. However, systematic V&V is difficult as it involves many manual-oriented tasks. Tool support is needed in order to more conveniently perform software V&V. In response, we developed four kinds of computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools to support system specification for a formal-based analysis according to the software lifecycle. In this work, we achieved optimized integration of each tool. The toolset, NuSEE, is an integrated environment for software specification and V&V for PLC based safety-critical systems. In accordance with the software lifecycle, NuSEE consists of NuSISRT for the concept phase, NuSRS for the requirements phase, NuSDS for the design phase and NuSCM for configuration management. It is believed that after further development our integrated environment will be a unique and promising software specification and analysis toolset that will support the entire software lifecycle for the development of PLC based NPP safety-critical systems.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1997.05a
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• pp.153-158
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• 1997

This paper describes a formal safety analysis technique which is demonstrated by performing empirical formal safety analysis with the case study of beamline hutch door Interlock system that is developed by using PLC(Programmable Logic Controller) systems at the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory. In order to perform formal safety analysis, we have built the Z formal specifications representation from user requirement written in ambiguous natural language and target PLC ladder logic, respectively. We have also studied the effective method to express typical PLC timer component by using specific Z formal notation which is supported by temporal history. We present a formal proof technique specifying and verifying that the hazardous states are not introduced into ladder logic in the PLC-based safety critical system.