Reliability and safety [ LBNEN2003 ]

See www.sckcen.be/bnen

Brochures and Info
Background books W. D'haeseleer

• Introduction to nuclear safety: hazard sources, safety functions, safety systems, defence in depth, line of defence method
• Safety goals and risk based criteria: the concept of risk, individual and societal risk criteria, release limits, core damage frequency limit, safety goals at function or system level
• The safety design cycle: (conservative) deterministic analysis based on design basis accidents and (best estimate) analysis of beyond design basis events; probabilistic analysis as a review of the safety design;
• Overall process of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA): PSA level 1, 2 and 3
• Qualitative analysis: hazard and scenario identification methods (FMEA, HAZOP, Event trees..)
• Component reliability: basic RAMS concepts, failure and repair time distributions, estimation of parameters from real life data, uncertainty bounds, Bayesian estimation of parameters
• Systems reliability:
  o Fault tree analysis: fault tree construction, coherence of fault trees, logical and probabilistic analysis of fault trees, system unavailability, expected number of failures, criticality of events and minimal cut sets, o Markov analysis: state diagrams, transition matrices, determination of system unavailability and system
• Common cause failure analysis: type of dependencies, qualitative and quantitative analysis of common cause failures
• Elements of human reliability analysis
• Accident sequence analysis: event trees, determination of sequence frequencies and plant response
• Elements of PSA level 2 and level 3 methodology
• Exploitation of PSA results

• To present elements of nuclear safety philosophy
• To present the approach for embedding safety in design of nuclear facilities and to perform safety analysis (both deterministic and probabilistic)
• To learn the basic notions and techniques of system reliability engineering
• To understand the fundamentals of probabilistic safety analysis (PSA).
• To be able to assess the overall quality of the PSA methodology.

La contribution de cette UE au développement et à la maîtrise des compétences et acquis du (des) programme(s) est accessible à la fin de cette fiche, dans la partie « Programmes/formations proposant cette unité d’enseignement (UE) ».

Two parts each counting for half of the quotation marks:

• A practical exercise to be prepared by the student covering the subject of reliability assessment and to be sent in to the teacher;
• An oral examination (open book) on the understanding of the concepts treated in the course

• 1 t.m.
• Practical exercises: exercise on fault trees with ASTRA, Risk-Spectrum or Aralia-Simtree in SCK.CEN

• McCormick, N., Reliability and Risk Analysis ' Methods and Nuclear Power Applications, Academic Press, New York, 1981.
•  Henley, E.J. and Kumamoto, H., Reliability Engineering and Risk Analysis, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1981.
• Modarres, M., What Every Engineer Should Know about Reliability and Risk Analysis, Dekker Inc., New York, 1993.
• Kumamoto, H., and Henley, E.J., Probabilistic Risk Assessment and Management for Engineers and Scientists, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2001.
• Bedford, T. and Cooke, R., Probabilistic Risk Analysis, Foundations and Methods, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001.

André POUCET Andre.poucet@ec.europa.eu

Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven - Louvain)
Head of the Unit "Traceability and vulnerability assessment" at the European Commission Joint Research Centre
Burg. Electro Werktuigkundig ir. (KUL 1976), Doctor in de Toegepaste Wetenschappen (KUL 1983)
Research fields: Risk assessment methodology, fusion reactor safety assessment, measurement systems and information technologies applied to verification of non-proliferation regimes
Teaching duties in BNEN: Safety and reliability
Editorial duties: Member of the editorial board of the international journal "Reliability Engineering and System Safety" (1986-1996)
Other duties: former General Secretary of the European Safety and Reliability Research and Development Association ESRRDA (1988-1991).