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.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

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).