• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.360-360
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• 2011

In this work, SUS310S used for valve plate assembly was electron beam (EB) welded to determine the influence of the parametric conditions on the characteristics of the weld and to minimize porosity and micro-fissures among others. The evolution in the weld geometry and microstructure was examined as a function of the process conditions such as beam current and focusing current under a constant welding speed and accelerating voltage. The integrity of the EB welds in SUS310S was examined for defects (e.g. cracking, porosity, etc.), adequate penetration depth, and tolerable weld width deviation for the various welding conditions. Optical microscopy (OM), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis (XPS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and 3D micro-computed tomography (Micro-CT) for the cross section analysis of the electron beam welded SUS310S were utilized. The tensile strength and hardness were analyzed for the mechanical properties of the EB weld. At the 6 kV accelerating voltage, it was determined that a satisfactory penetration depth and desirable weld width deviation requires a beam current of 30 mA and a focusing current of 0.687 A at the welding speed of 25 mm/sec.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.107-115
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• 2018

To ensure the structural integrity of nuclear power plants, it is essential to predict the lifetime of Alloy 182 weld, which is used for welding in nuclear reactors. The lifetime of Alloy 182 weld is directly related to the crack initiation time. Owing to the large time scatter in most crack initiation tests, a probabilistic model, such as the Weibull distribution, has mainly been adopted for prediction. However, since statistically more advanced methods than current typical methods may be applied, we suggest a statistical procedure for parameter estimation of the crack initiation time of Alloy 182 weld, considering right-censored data and the covariate effect. Furthermore, we suggest a procedure for uncertainty evaluation of the estimators based on the bootstrap method. The suggested statistical procedure can be applied not only to Alloy 182 weld but also to any material degradation data set including right-censored data with covariate effect.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.6 no.6
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• pp.40-52
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• 1998

A good grasp of the failure mechanisms of resistance spot weld, widely used in joining the auto-panels, in essential to the structural/crashworthy analyses and integrity assessment of the whole auto-body. In this study, We provide an estimative model describing the failure behavior of resistance spotf weld, and apply the model to the finite element analysis of crashworthiness. First, in "Part 1-Failure Criteria", to be used for the finite element analysis of spot-welded structural panels of an auto-body, (i) a methodology for quantifying the spot weld failure and the accompanying failure criteria are presented, and (ii) the coefficients of the failure equation are determined by a munimum number of appropriate experimental tests. To achieve these, we derive the functional form of the failure envelop by limit analysis, and correlate it with the form in PAM-$CRASH^{TM}$ code, and also investigate the effect of the failure coefficients on the failure envelop form. An estimative model obtained in this Part1, as spot weld failure criteria is applied to the Macroscopic finite element analysis of autobody structural panels using PAM-$CRASH^{TM}$ code in Part 2.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.152-165
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• 1998

This study proposes the analysis and evaluation method of time series ultrasonic signal using the chaoral post-process system for precision rate enhancement of ultrasonic pattern recognition. Chaos features extracted from time series data for analysis quantitatively weld defects For this purpose, feature extraction objectives in this study are fractal dimension, Lyapunov exponent, shape of strange attrator. Trajectory changes in the strange attractor indicated that even same type of defects carried substantial difference in chaoticity resulting from distance shifts such as nearby 0.5, 1.0 skip distance. Such difference in chaoticity enables the evaluation of unique features of defects in the weld zone. In quantitative chaos fenture extraction, feature values of 0.835 and 0.823 in the case of slag inclusion and 0.609 and 0.573 in the case of crack were suggested on the basis of fractal dimension and Lyapunov exponent. Proposed chaoral post-process system in this study can enhances precision rate of ultrasonic pattern recognition results from defect signals of weld zone, such as slag inclusion and crack.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1998.05b
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• pp.795-801
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• 1998

Metallic fatigue of Pressurized Water Reactor(PWR) materials is a generic safety issue for commercial nuclear power plants. It is very important to obtain the fatigue usage factor for component integrity and life extension. In this paper, fatigue usage was obtained at the inside surface of Kori unit 2, 3 and 4 RCP casing weld, based on the design transient. And it was intended to establish the procedure and the detailed method of fatigue evaluation in accordance with ASME Section III Code. According to this code rule, two methods to determine the stress cycle and the number of cycles could be applied. One method is the superposition of cycles of various design transients and the other is based on the assumption that a stress cycle correspond to only one design transient. Both method showed almost same fatigue usage in the RCP casing weld.

• International Journal of Korean Welding Society
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.44-50
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• 2001

A genetic algorithm was applied to the arc welding process as to determine the near-optimal settings of welding process parameters that produce the good weld quality. This method searches for optimal settings of welding parameters through the systematic experiments without the need for a model between the input and output variables. It has an advantage of being capable to find the optimal conditions with a fewer number of experiments rather than conventional full factorial designs. A genetic algorithm was applied to the optimization of the weld bead geometry. In the optimization problem, the input variables were wire feed rate, welding voltage, and welding speed. The output variables were the bead height bead width, and penetration. The number of levels for each input variable is 16, 16, and 8, respectively. Therefore, according to the conventional full factorial design, in order to find the optimal welding conditions,2048 experiments must be performed. The genetic algorithm, however, found the near optimal welding conditions in less than 40 experiments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.595-601
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• 2005

A mobile robot system utilizing NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) method is designed and fabricated f3r automatic integrity evaluation of large sized industrial reservoirs and pipelines. The developed mobile robot can crawl over the outer surface of the industrial facilities even though the shape of the structures is various and unsymmetric. The robot detects defects such as pinholes, cracks and thickness reduction at the wall of the facilities using EMAT (Electro-Magnetic Acoustic Transducer). Image processing technology for weld line detection at the surface of the target and host programs including defect detecting algorithms are also developed. Automation of defect detection for these kinds of large facilities using mobile robots is helpful to prevent significant troubles of the structures without danger of human beings under harmful environment.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.99-107
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• 2000

A probabilistic integrity analysis method is presented for a reactor vessel under pressurized thermal shock(PTS) based on Monte Carlo simulation. This method can be applied to the structural integrity assessment of a reactor vessel subjected to pressurized thermal shock where the coolant temperature transient cannot be expressed explicitly as a time function. An axially or circumferentially oriented infinite length surface crack is assumed to be in the beltline weld region of the rector vessel's inside surface. The random variables are the initial crack depth, neutron fluence on the vessel's inside surface, the copper and nickel content of the vessel materials, R $T_{NDT}$ , $K_{IC}$ , and K/aub la/. The reliability of a sample reactor vessel under PTS is assessed quantitatively and the influence of the amount of neutron fluence is also examined by applying the present method.sent method.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.97-101
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• 2010

PWSCC(Primary Stress Corrosion Cracking) in Alloy 82/182 butt welds is the problem affecting safety and integrity of nuclear power plant. PWSCC can be occurred in the area that is at high magnitude of tensile residual stress, such as Alloy 82/182 dissimilar metal welds in PZR(pressurizer) nozzles. There have been a number of incidents recently at the dissimilar metal welds in overseas nuclear power plants. Overlay weld is the one of the effective methods to decrease tensile residual stress of inside surface, which will result in preventing PWSCC. In this paper, overlay weld conditions on the purpose of preventing PWSCC was explained and the benefit of the overlay weld was confirmed performing finite element analysis.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.79-83
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• 2010

The conventional welding technique such as shield metal arc welding has been mostly applied to the piping system of the nuclear power plants. It is well known that this welding technique causes the overheating and welding defects due to the large groove angle of weld. On the other hand, the narrow gap welding(NGW) technique has many merits, for instance, the reduction of welding time, the shrinkage of weld and the small deformation of the weld due to the small groove angle and welding bead width comparing with the conventional welds. These characteristics of NGW affect the deformation behavior and the distribution of welding residual stress of NGW, thus it is believed that the residual stress results obtained from conventional welding procedure may not be applied to structural integrity evaluation of NGW. In this paper, the welding residual stress of NGW was predicted using the nonlinear finite element analysis to simulate the thermal and mechanical effects of the NGW. The present results can be used as the important information to perform the flaw evaluation and to improve the weld procedure of NGW.