• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.127-138
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• 1994

The application of fault tree technique to the analysis of compressor failure is considered. The techniques involve the decomposition of the system into a form of fault tree where certain basic events lead to a specified top event which signifies the total failure of the system. In this paper, fault trees are made by using fault train of screw type air compressor failure. The fault trees are used to obtain minimal cut sets from the modes of system failure and, hence the system failure rate for the top event can be calculated. The method of constructing fault trees and the subsequent estimation of reliability of the system is illustrated through compressor failure. It is proved that FTA is efficient to investigate the compressor failure modes and diagnose system.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.193-208
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• 2008

This paper focuses on assessing the failure of one of the transmission towers that collapsed in Winnipeg, Canada, as a result of a microburst event. The study is conducted using a fluid-structure numerical model that was developed in-house. A major challenge in microburst-related problems is that the forces acting on a structure vary with the microburst parameters including the descending jet velocity, the diameter of the event and the relative location between the structure and the jet. The numerical model, which combines wind field data for microbursts together with a non-linear finite element formulation, is capable of predicting the progressive failure of a tower that initiates after one of its member reaches its capacity. The model is employed first to determine the microburst parameters that are likely to initiate failure of a number of critical members of the tower. Progressive failure analysis of the tower is then conducted by applying the loads associated with those critical configurations. The analysis predicts a collapse of the conductors cross-arm under a microburst reference velocity that is almost equal to the corresponding value for normal wind load that was used in the design of the structure. A similarity between the predicted modes of failure and the post event field observations was shown.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.981-988
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• 2023

A seismic event caused an accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which further resulted in simultaneous accidents at several units. Consequently, this incident has aroused great interest in the safety of nuclear power plants worldwide. A reasonable safety evaluation of such an external event should appropriately consider the correlation between SSCs (structures, systems, and components) and the probability of failure. However, a probabilistic safety assessment in current nuclear industries is performed conservatively, assuming that the failure correlation between SSCs is independent or completely dependent. This is an extreme assumption; a reasonable risk can be calculated, or risk-based decision-making can be conducted only when the appropriate failure correlation between SSCs is considered. Thus, this study analyzed the effect of the failure correlation of SSCs on the safety of the system to realize rational safety assessment and decision-making. Consequently, the impact on the system differs according to the size of the failure probability of the SSCs and the AND and OR conditions.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.1092-1100
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• 2004

This paper describes the application of fault tree technique to analyze of compressor failure. Fault tree analysis technique involves the decomposition of a system into the specific form of fault tree where certain basic events lead to a specified top event which signifies the total failure of the system. In this research. fault trees for failure analysis of screw type air compressor are made. This fault trees are used to obtain minimal cut sets from system failure and system failure rate for the top event occurrence can be calculated. It is Possible to estimate air compressor reliability by using constructed fault trees through compressor failure example. It is Proved that FTA is efficient to investigate the compressor failure modes and diagnose system.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.90-96
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• 2016

This study proposes a dynamic reliability analysis of control system as a method of quantitative evaluation of its performance in probabilistic terms. In this dynamic reliability analysis, the failure event is defined as an event that the dynamic response of the structural system exceeds a displacement limit, whereas the conventional reliability analysis method has limitations that do not properly assess the actual time history response of the structure subjected to dynamic loads, such as earthquakes and high winds, by taking the static response into account in the failure event. In this first paper, we discuss the control effect of the viscous damper on the seismic performance of the member-level failure where the failure event of the structural member consists of the union set of time-sequential member failures during the earthquake excitations and the failure probability of the earthquake-excited structural member is computed using system reliability approach to consider the statistical dependence of member failures between the subsequent time points. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach can present a reliable assessment of the control performance of the viscous damper system in comparison with MCS method. The most important advantage of the proposed approach can provide us more accurate estimate of failure probability of the structural control system by using the actual time-history responses obtained by dynamic response analysis.

• Applied Biological Chemistry
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.245-252
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• 2007

FTA (fault tree analysis), an analytical method for system failure management, was employed in the management of faults in running PCR analysis. PCR is executed through several processes, in which the process of PCR machine operation was selected for the analysis by FTA. The reason for choosing the simplest process in the PCR analysis was to adopt it as a first trial to test a feasibility of the FTA approach. First, fault events-top event, intermediate event, basic events-were identified by survey on expert knowledge of PCR. Then those events were correlated deductively to build a fault tree in hierarchical structure. The fault tree was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively, yielding minimal cut sets, structural importance, common cause vulnerability, simulation of probability of occurrence of top event, cut set importance, item importance and sensitivity. The top event was 'errors in the step of PCR machine operation in running PCR analysis'. The major intermediate events were 'failures in instrument' and 'errors in actions in experiment'. The basic events were four events, one event and one event based on human errors, instrument failure and energy source failure, respectively. Those events were combined with Boolean logic gates-AND or OR, constructing a fault tree. In the qualitative evaluation of the tree, the basic events-'errors in preparing the reaction mixture', 'errors in setting temperature and time of PCR machine', 'failure of electrical power during running PCR machine', 'errors in selecting adequate PCR machine'-proved the most critical in the occurrence of the fault of the top event. In the quantitative evaluation, the list of the critical events were not the same as that from the qualitative evaluation. It was because the probability value of PCR machine failure, not on the list above though, increased with used time, and the probability of the events of electricity failure and defective of PCR machine were given zero due to rare likelihood of the events in general. It was concluded that this feasibility study is worth being a means to introduce the novel technique, FTA, to the management of faults in running PCR analysis.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.654-662
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• 2016

As the number of gates and basic events in fault trees increases, it becomes difficult to calculate the exact probability of the top event. In order to overcome this difficulty the BDD methodology can be used to calculate the exact top event probability for small and medium size fault trees in short time. Fault trees are converted to BDD by using CUDD library functions and a failure path search algorithm is proposed to calculate the exact top event probability. The backward search algorithm is more efficient than the forward one in finding failure paths and in the calculation of the top event probability. This backward search algorithm can reduce searching time in the identification of disjoint failure paths from BDD and can be considered as an effective tool to find the cut sets and the minimal cut sets for the given fault trees.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 2005

The present paper deals with the seismic response analysis and the evaluation of most likely failure modes for a water storage structure. For the stress analysis, a 3-D mathematical model has been adopted to represent the structure appropriately. The structure has been analyzed for both static and seismic loads. Seismic analysis has been carried out considering the hydrodynamic effects of the contained water. Based on the stress analyses results, the most likely failure modes viz. tensile cracking and compressive crushing of concrete for the various structural elements; caused by the seismic event have been investigated. Further an attempt has also been made to quantify the initial leakage rate and average emptying time for the structure during seismic event after evaluating the various crack parameters viz. crack-width and crack-spacing at the locations of interest. The results are presented with reference to peak ground acceleration (PGA) of the seismic event. It has been observed that, an increase in PGA would result in significant increase in stresses and crack width in the various structural members. Significant increase in initial leakage rate and decrease in average emptying time for the structure has also been observed with the increase in PGA.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.41-55
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• 2018

Accidental oil and gas leak is a critical concern for the offshore industry because it can lead to severe consequences and as a result, it is imperative to evaluate the probabilities of occurrence of the consequences of the leakage in order to assess the risk. Event Tree Analysis (ETA) is a technique to identify the consequences that can result from the occurrence of a hazardous event. The probability of occurrence of the consequences is evaluated by the ETA, based on the failure probabilities of the sequential events. Conventional ETA deals with events with crisp failure probabilities. In offshore applications, it is often difficult to arrive at a single probability measure due to lack of data or imprecision in data. In such a scenario, fuzzy set theory can be applied to handle imprecision and data uncertainty. This paper presents fuzzy ETA (FETA) methodology to compute the probability of the outcomes initiated due to oil/gas leak in an actual offshore-onshore installation. Post FETA, sensitivity analysis by Fuzzy Weighted Index (FWI) method is performed to find the event that has the maximum contribution to the severe sequences. It is found that events of 'ignition', spreading of fire to 'equipment' and 'other areas' are the highest contributors to the severe consequences, followed by failure of 'leak detection' and 'fire detection' and 'fire water not being effective'. It is also found that the frequency of severe consequences that are catastrophic in nature obtained by ETA is one order less than that obtained by FETA, thereby implying that in ETA, the uncertainty does not propagate through the event tree. The ranking of severe sequences based on their probability, however, are identical in both ETA and FETA.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.474-477
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• 2002

Safety is very important to operate nuclear power plant. To guarantee the safety, nuclear power plant should be run without trouble. This paper presents the application of a failure diagnosis approach based on discrete event system theory to the pressurizer pressure control system for Pressurized Water Reactor. Also, this paper shows a scheme of failure diagnosis by distributed diagnoser.