• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.657-665
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• 2021

Nondestructive evaluation methods play an important role in ensuring component integrity and safety in many industries. Operator fatigue can play a critical role in the reliability of such methods. This is important for inspecting high value assets or assets with a high consequence of failure, such as aerospace and nuclear components. Recent advances in convolution neural networks can support and automate these inspection efforts. This paper proposes using residual neural networks (ResNets) for real-time detection of corrosion, including iron oxide discoloration, pitting and stress corrosion cracking, in dry storage stainless steel canisters housing used nuclear fuel. The proposed approach crops nuclear canister images into smaller tiles, trains a ResNet on these tiles, and classifies images as corroded or intact using the per-image count of tiles predicted as corroded by the ResNet. The results demonstrate that such a deep learning approach allows to detect the locus of corrosion via smaller tiles, and at the same time to infer with high accuracy whether an image comes from a corroded canister. Thereby, the proposed approach holds promise to automate and speed up nuclear fuel canister inspections, to minimize inspection costs, and to partially replace human-conducted onsite inspections, thus reducing radiation doses to personnel.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.105-112
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• 2004

A waste container, one of the key components of a multi-barrier system in a potential high level radioactive waste (HLW) repository in Korea ensures the mechanical stability against the lithostatic pressure of a deep geologic medium and the swelling pressure of the bentonite buffer. Also, it delays potential release of radionuclides for a certain period of time, before it is corroded by intruding impurities. Even though the material of a waste container is carefully chosen and its manufacturing processes are under quality assurance processes, there is a possibility of initial defects in a waste container during manufacturing. Also, during the deposition of a waste container in a repository, there is a chance of an incident affecting the integrity of a waste container. In this study, the appropriate Features, Events, and Processes(FEP's) to describe these incidents and the associated scenario on radionuclide release from a container to the biosphere are developed. Then the total system performance assessment on the Initial waste Container Failure (ICF) scenario was carried out by the MASCOT-K, one of the probabilistic safety assessment tools KAERI has developed. Results show that for the data set used in this paper, the annual individual dose for the ICF scenario meets the Korean regulation on the post closure radiological safety of a repository.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2009

Transport package for radioactive material should be structurally safe under puncture drop condition and its safety should be verified by test and numerical analysis. Most finite element analyses for puncture drop have been performed without modeling the impact limiter since failure is occurred in the materials of the impact limiter. This paper presents a new modeling methodology, where an element is eroded in case that the material's failure criteria are reached at the element's integration point, to investigate the effect of the impact limiter in the puncture process. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is shown through the puncture drop analysis of hotcell transport cask, which is under design in KAERI. The results show that about 80 percent of the total impact energy is absorbed due to the deformation of impact limiter. Using the present method the puncture drop can be analyzed more accurately, but it would give conservative results compared to the actual test condition.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.14-25
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• 2018

The combined cycle power plant has a cycle of operating the gas turbine with fuel, such as natural gas, and then producing steam using residual heat. The fuel gas is supplied to the gas turbine at a level of 4 to 5 MPa, $200^{\circ}C$ through a compressor and a heat exchanger. In this study, the risk assessment method considering the piping system stress was carried out for safe operation and soundness of the gas fuel supply piping system. The API 580/581 RBI code, which is well known for its risk assessment techniques, is limited to reflect the effect of piping stress on risk. Therefore, the systematic stress of the pipeline is analyzed by using the piping analysis. For the study, the piping system stress analysis was performed using design data of a gas fuel supply piping of a combined cycle power plant. The result of probability of failure evaluated by the API code is compared to the result of stress ratio by piping analysis.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.13-29
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• 2016

In this study, we analyzed the causes of major faults in the biogas plant through the case of gas engine failure when cogenerating electricity and heat using biogas as a fuel in the actual sewage treatment plant and suggested countermeasures. Hydrogen sulfide in the biogas entering the biogas engine and water caused by intermittent malfunction of the water removal system caused intercooler corrosion in the biogas engine. In addition, the siloxane in the biogas forms a silicate compound with silicon dioxide, which causes scratches and wear of the piston surface and the inner wall of the cylinder liner. The substances attached to the combustion chamber and the exhaust system were analyzed to be combined with hydrogen sulfide and other impurities. It is believed that hydrogen sulfide was supplied to the desulfurization plant for a long period of time because of the high content of hydrogen sulfide (more than 50ppm) in the biogas and the hydrogen sulfide was introduced into the engine due to the decrease of the removal efficiency due to the breakthrough point of the activated carbon in the desulfurization plant. In addition, the hydrogen sulfide degrades the function of the activated carbon for siloxane removal of the adsorption column, which is considered to be caused by the introduction of unremoved siloxane waste into the engine, resulting in various types of engine failure. Therefore, hydrogen sulfide, siloxane, and water can be regarded as the main causes of the failure of the biogas engine. Among them, hydrogen sulfide reacts with other materials causing failure and can be regarded as a substance having a great influence on the pretreatment process. As a result, optimization of $H_2S$ removal method seems to be an essential measure for stable operation of the biogas engine.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.179-186
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• 2009

This paper presents a thermal creep test under internal pressure and post-test characterization performed on high burnup (68 MWd/kgU) ZIRLO. This research has been done by the CSN, ENRESA, and ENUSA in order to investigate the behavior of advanced cladding materials in contemporary PWRs at higher burnup under dry cask storage conditions. Also, to investigate the hydride reorientation, the cool-down of the samples after the test has been done in a coordinated manner with the internal pressure. The creep results obtained are consistent with the expected behavior from reference CWSR material, Zr-4. During the test, the material retained significant ductility: one specimen leaked during the test at an engineering strain of the tube section of 17%; remarkably, the crack closed due to de-pressurization. Although significant hydride reorientation occurred during the cool-down under pressure, no specimen failed during the cool-down.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.7-12
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• 2004

A lifetime prediction of holddown spring screw in nuclear fuel assembly was performed using fracture mechanics approach. The spring screw was designed such that it was capable of sustaining the loads imposed by the initial tensile preload and operational loads. In order to investigate the cause of failure and to predict the stress corrosion cracking life of the screw, a stress analysis of the top nozzle spring assembly was done using finite element analysis. The elastic-plastic finite element analysis showed that the local stresses at the critical regions of head-shank fillet and thread root significantly exceeded than the yield strength of the screw material, resulting in local plastic deformation. Normalized stress intensity factors for PWSCC life prediction was proposed. Primary water stress corrosion cracking life of the Inconel 600 screw was predicted by using integration of the Scott model and resulted in 1.78 years, which was fairly close to the actual service life of the holddown spring screw.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.8-13
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• 2010

Many vehicles have significantly under-inflated tires, primarily because drivers infrequently check their vehicles' tire pressure. When a tire is used while significantly under-inflated, its sidewalls flex more and the tire temperature increases, increasing stress and the risk of failure. In this study we evaluated tire safety and economical efficiency at various inflation pressure. For tire safety we performed FMVSS indoor durability test, measurement of rolling tire temperature, braking performance at dry/wet road condition, and rolling resistance test for economical efficiency. Results show that low pressure decreases tire durability of both speed-increase condition and load-increase condition. Heat temperature of rolling tire increases as pressure decreases and significantly under-inflated tires cause increase of vehicle's stopping distance at wet road condition. Also Under-inflation increases the rolling resistance of a tire and, correspondingly, decreases vehicle's fuel economy.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.195-199
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• 2007

In this study, bond strength tests were performed for the thermal barrier coating applied to the 1st stage turbine blade. After the tests, the specimens were cut and the locations of failure were observed by using optical microscope. The influence of heat treatment on bond strength of a bond coating and the difference among the three types of bond coatings are treated.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.167.2-167
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• 2001

This paper presents guidance and control laws which guarantee a minimum fuel consumption and have obustness against various disturbances during a terminal-landing phase on the lunar surface. The nonlinear robust tracking control system is designed to track the reference profiles, which are expressed by exponential functions. An adjustment law in the tracking controller is given in the form of the differential equations with respect to the controller´s variable gains. Computer simulations are performed to examine the tracking accuracy, the robustness in a thrust failure mode, and the vertical soft landing at a pre-assigned point on the lunar surface. The results of numerical simulation show the effectiveness of the present control law.