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Li, Jonathan

Publications and source records attributed to Li, Jonathan.

Passive Safety System Reliability Analysis: Methodology, Application, and Results

Many advanced reactor designs rely on passive systems to provide assurance that certain safety functions, such as reactivity control and reactor heat removal, are maintained during transient scenarios. The performance of these systems is sensitive to boundary and environmental conditions and can lead to functional failure, which is the inability of the system to perform as intended even without any physical failures. Additionally, conditions can cause the passive systems to operate in an intermediate or degraded state. These operational modes of passive systems and their overall reliability can be difficult to capture in traditional probabilistic frameworks where discrete operating modes are assumed or time-dependent boundary conditions are not accounted for. Novel strategies and methods are needed to be able to capture the reliability of these passive systems and their impact on facility safety. The current abstract provides a summary of such a methodology and examples of its use in a case study, the GE Hitachi (GEH) PRISM probabilistic safety assessment (PSA), and the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) PSA.

Bucknor, M.↗

Passive Safety System Reliability Analysis: Lessons Learned and Open Items

Passive safety systems have multiple benefits, largely stemming from their high functional reliability due to their simplicity and lack of dependencies. However, accurately assessing the reliability of passive systems can be challenging due in large part to the possibility of functional failures. Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) has been involved in several recent efforts concerning the reliability assessment of passive safety systems for advanced, non-light water reactors (non-LWRs). These efforts have focused on the development and application of mechanistic methods for the evaluation of passive system reliability, which rely on system modelling and uncertainty analyses to derive reliability values for use in probabilistic safety assessments (PSAs). Further information on these efforts is provided in ref [1]. The current paper reviews key lessons learned through these projects, along with outstanding open items regarding the reliability assessment of passive systems.

Grabaskas, David↗

Environmental Testbed Development to Evaluate Power Distribution Materials in Electrified Aircraft (EA)

NASA is pursuing the development of electrified propulsion (EP) technologies to improve air transportation in terms of efficiency, affordability, and sustainability. The power requirements are expected to reach 20 megawatts for large EP commercial airliners. A key challenge is transmission and distribution of the high voltage (20 kilovolts) needed for some EP systems. This is a challenge because the risk of electrical failure in aircraft at high altitude (low pressure) due to corona discharge and other forms of partial discharge increases significantly when voltages exceed 327 V. Corona discharge is a form of partial discharge in which gaseous molecules are ionized by strong electric fields. Corona discharge leads to aging in power transmission lines. Aging is a leading cause of electrical failure in electrical insulation materials. In particular, aging from electrical, vibrational, and thermal stresses decrease the performance life of insulation materials. There are currently no test standards or equipment that can effectively age materials under high altitude, voltage and frequency conditions. This poster proposes a design for a test system including an environmental chamber that can simulate the environment of future EP systems for material and component aging tests.

Materials Test chamber Design↗