• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.803-816
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• 2014

Defense-in-depth is a fundamental safety principle for the design and operation of nuclear power plants. Despite its general appeal, defense-in-depth is not without its drawbacks, which include its potential for concealing the occurrence of hazardous states in a system, and more generally rendering the latter more opaque for its operators and managers, thus resulting in safety blind spots. This in turn translates into a shrinking of the time window available for operators to identify an unfolding hazardous condition or situation and intervene to abate it. To prevent this drawback from materializing, we propose in this work a novel safety principle termed "observability-in-depth". We characterize it as the set of provisions technical, operational, and organizational designed to enable the monitoring and identification of emerging hazardous conditions and accident pathogens in real-time and over different time-scales. Observability-in-depth also requires the monitoring of conditions of all safety barriers that implement defense-in-depth; and in so doing it supports sensemaking of identified hazardous conditions, and the understanding of potential accident sequences that might follow (how they can propagate). Observability-in-depth is thus an information-centric principle, and its importance in accident prevention is in the value of the information it provides and actions or safety interventions it spurs. We examine several "event reports" from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission database, which illustrate specific instances of violation of the observability-in-depth safety principle and the consequences that followed (e.g., unmonitored releases and loss of containments). We also revisit the Three Mile Island accident in light of the proposed principle, and identify causes and consequences of the lack of observability-in-depth related to this accident sequence. We illustrate both the benefits of adopting the observability-in-depth safety principle and the adverse consequences when this principle is violated or not implemented. This work constitutes a first step in the development of the observability-in-depth safety principle, and we hope this effort invites other researchers and safety professionals to further explore and develop this principle and its implementation.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.1814-1820
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• 2018

State estimation of power systems has become vital in recent days of power operation and control. SCADA and EMS are intended for the state estimation and to communicate and monitor the systems which are operated at specified time. Although various methods are used we can achieve the better results by using PMU technique. On placing the PMU, operating time is reduced and making the performance reliable. In this paper, PMU placement is done in two ways. Those are 'optimal technique with pruning operation' and 'depth of unobservability' considering incomplete and complete observability of a network. By Depth of Unobservability Number of PMUs are reduced to attain Observability of the network. Proposed methods are tested on IEEE 14, 30, 57, SR-system and Sub systems (1, 2) with bus size of 270 and 444 buses. Along with achieving complete observability analysis, single PMU loss condition is also achieved.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.76.2-76.2
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• 2012

We present the first simulations of cosmic reionization that include the first stars and their radiative feedback that limited their formation, in a volume large enough to capture the spatial variations that affected the process and its observability. We show hat these first stars made reionization begin much earlier than without, and was reatly extended, which boosts the intergalactic electron-scattering optical depth and the large-angle polarization fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) significantly. Although within current WMAP uncertainties, this will enable Planck see he signature of the first stars at high redshift, currently undetectable by other probes.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.584-591
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• 2014

This paper presents a novel aided navigation method for AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles). The navigation system for AUV includes several sensors such as IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), DVL (Doppler Velocity Log) and depth sensor. In general, the $13^{th}$ order INS error model, which includes depth error, velocity error, attitude error, and the accelerometer and gyroscope biases as state variables is used with measurements from DVL and depth sensors. However, the model may degrade the estimation performance of the heading state. Therefore, the $11^{th}$ INS error model is proposed. Its validity is verified by using a degree of observability and analyzing steady state error. The performance of the proposed model is shown by the computer simulation. The results show that the performance of the reduced $11^{th}$ order error model is better than that of the conventional $13^{th}$ order error model.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.106-113
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• 2008

This paper presents an underwater navigation system based on range measurements from a known reference station fixed on the sea bottom or floated at surface with a buoy, for which the system is extended to 3-dimensional coordinates. We formulated a state equation in polar coordinates and constituted an extended Kalman filter for discrete-time implementation of the navigation algorithm. The autonomous underwater vehicle, lSiMl, cruising with a constant speed can estimate its trajectory using just range measurements and additional depth, heading and pitch sensors. Simulation studies were performed to evaluate the underwater navigation of the maneuvering AUV with range measurements. We modulated the sample rate of range measurements to evaluate the effect of the update rate, and changed the initial position error of the AUV to check the robustness to estimation errors. Simulation results illustrates that the extended navigation system provides convergence of the state estimates. The navigation system was conditionally stable when it had initial position errors.