Sharif Digital Repository

Background and aims: Among different types of occupational accidents in the construction industry, falls and falling objects accidents (group I) account for 44% of construction accidents. Hit by vehicle, electric shock, collapse in the excavation and fire or explosion accidents (group II), while are only 7% frequent, make up about 26% of all fatalities and total disabling accidents. The aim of this study is to investigate these two groups of accidents and to discuss the obtained results in order to identify the potential hazards of construction industry. Methods: Data mining methods are employed to analyze data in this research. Hence, 21864 data records which were provided by Social... 

In stressful situations such as severe accidents in nuclear power plants, operators need support tools to ease decision making in the selection of accident management measures. Following the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in 1979, the first severe accident in a nuclear power plant, Accident Management Support Tools (AMSTs) were extensively developed and installed in a number of nuclear power plants. Lessons learned from the Fukushima accident highlighted the importance of accident management in mitigation severe accidents and suggested the reconsideration of accident management programs, which in turn created the need for AMSTs adaption and modernization. This paper provides the first... 

On July 24th, 2010, several explosions and fires devastated a hydrocarbon processing plant in Kharg Island, Iran. Four workers were killed and many others were severely injured. The plant became out of service for 80 days. The way the accident happened and its sequence was representing as a domino accident. In this paper, events leading up to the disaster have been analyzed in details. Graphic presentation techniques such as Fish Bone Analysis and Event Sequence Diagram (ESD) have been utilized to enhance the understanding of the accident mechanism. Finally major lessons learnt from this domino accident have been addressed  

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the fundamental building blocks in measuring and monitoring processes of safety management. This chapter describes a classification of safety KPIs and a review of literature leads to a new framework. It aims to develop a logical selection and aggregation methodology for generating a single number that reflects safety performance. Determining a mechanism for performance measurement and monitoring is a key part of any management system, and this has a higher importance for total safety management. Personal safety deals with the prevention of occupational accidents that usually have low severities and high frequencies. The measurement of safety has been... 

The paper presents an inventory, perhaps the most comprehensive till date, of the major process-industry accidents involving 'domino effect'. The inventory includes, among other relevant information, the sequence of accidents that had occurred in each domino episode. The information has been analyzed to identify several patterns which may be useful in further work on understanding domino effect and reducing the probability of its occurrence in future. A concept of 'local domino effect' has been introduced  

This paper reviews the literature concerning the effectiveness of countermeasures at Highway-Railway Grade Crossings (HRGC). HRGC are considered as the hotspots in railway transportation systems. So far, there has been significant discussion about different types of countermeasure to mitigate the risk of accidents at HRGC. Different approaches have been developed about the effectiveness of the countermeasures including the Before-After and Cross-Sectional. This paper compares all different studies to evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasure in reduction of accident frequency and severity  

This research focuses on a sensitivity analysis of accumulators configuration in a Large Break Loss of Coolant Accident (LB-LOCA) in Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP). In this way, primary and secondary side components are modeled using RELAP5/MOD3.3 code. Having modeled the BNPP in a steady state hot full power operation, the thermal hydraulic consequences of a LB-LOCA in the reactor inlet is considered and sensitivity analysis for four major different configurations of accumulators are studied in detail. It is shown that any arrangement of accumulators in the Reactor Pressure Chamber (RPC) or Reactor Collection Chambers (RCC) leads to variation of fuel and clad temperatures during the... 

A historical survey was performed on 330 accidents involving domino effect, occurred in process/storage plants and in the transportation of hazardous materials; only accidents occurred after 1st-January-1961 have been considered. The main features - geographical location, type of accident, materials involved, origin and causes, consequences, domino sequences - were analyzed, with special consideration to the situation in the developing countries and compared to those from other previous surveys. Among the involved substances, LPG was the most frequent one, followed by liquid hydrocarbons. Process plants (38.5% of cases) and storage areas (33%) were the most common settings; 10.6% of past... 

This paper describes an attempt to shed some light on road safety in Asia Pacific region by characterizing and assessing its road accidents. The relevant national road accident data were extracted from centralized data sources of international agencies. Due to data incompleteness and missing values, 21 Asia Pacific countries, presenting more than half of the world's population, were selected for detailed analysis. The study database consisted of 7 variables, covering years 1980 and 1995. The univariate and multivariate statistical analyses for the selected countries showed interesting results and relations for the selected variables. Accident rates, reflecting road accident risk and... 

Truck accidents are an issue of concern due to their severity. Logit modeling and Neural Network modeling are performed to investigate factors such as vehicle, roadway, environment and driver characteristics that can potentially contribute to the severity of truck accidents. The objective of this study is to present models that can predict the severity of truck accidents and to identify the important factors causing these accidents. Comparison between neural networks and logit modeling are made using vehicle crash data on two-lane rural highways in Iran. A variety of variables related to roadways, vehicles, environment and drivers, such as, driver fatigue, head-on collision and lack of... 

This paper deals with break size estimation of loss of coolant accidents (LOCA) using a nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous inputs (NARX) neural network. Previous studies used static approaches, requiring time-integrated parameters and independent firing algorithms. NARX neural network is able to directly deal with time-dependent signals for dynamic estimation of break sizes in real-time. The case studied is a LOCA in the primary system of Bushehr nuclear power plant (NPP). In this study, number of hidden layers, neurons, feedbacks, inputs, and training duration of transients are selected by performing parametric studies to determine the network architecture with minimum error. The... 

Marine accidents especially when considering ship accidents and crashes are addressed here in this paper. In order to identify damage stability in ships and marine vessels, there are basically two main approaches including: deterministic methods, and probabilistic methods. A probabilistic method is used here in this paper and because of probabilistic calculus; statistical data is needed to identify models, methods, etc. IMO data base is used to do analysis and present research results. Probabilistic modeling has been performed by introducing three individual factors which are as follows: a) the probability that one or more than one ship compartments to be flooded (there is no any more... 

Several studies have investigated road traffic deaths, but few have compared by road user type. Iran, with an estimated 44 road traffic deaths per 100,000 population in 2002 had higher road traffic deaths than any other country for which reliable estimates can be made. So, the present study was conducted on road death data and identified fatal accident distribution by age, gender and head injury as well as the influences of age and gender on deaths at accident scenes for all road user groups. Data used in this study are on fatal road accidents recorded by forensic medicine experts of the Khorasan Razavi province in Mashhad, the capital of the province, the second largest city and the largest... 

The consequences of road accidents are significant for drivers and society. The connected vehicle system (CVS) is a promising technology that can improve road safety by warning drivers of traffic hazards. Broad implementation of the CVS could mitigate the harmful consequences of road accidents. Widespread implementation requires schemes that can promote the pervasive adoption of the system by drivers. This study proposes the innovative idea of implementing the CVS in usage-based insurance (UBI) as a measurement probe and modeling drivers' acceptance of the new UBI scheme. This study developed a random effect logit model demonstrating that the drivers of cheaper vehicles and middle-age... 

The ultimate purpose of the nuclear power plant safety is to protect the public and the environment from unacceptable radiation exposure in all operational states. This paper presents a novel severe accident management framework to cope with the risk of radioactive material release to the environment. The objective is to reduce the contribution of severe accidents to the large and early release frequencies of radioactive materials for a VVER-1000 nuclear reactor. The proposed approach includes the emergency actions of NPP personnel aiming to recover the lost alternating power and restore the core cooling process by all means available at the site. In addition, mobile equipment including a... 

In this research, new software package for neutronic calculations, especially kinetic parameters of PWR reactors, has been developed. The program used to link the WIMS-D5, BORGES and CITVAP nuclear codes has been written in Visual C# programming language. This software was used for calculation of kinetic parameters of WER-1000 and NOK Beznau reaction The ration (βeff)i/(βeff)corewhich are an important input data for the reactivity accident analysis, were also calculated. The results were compared with final safety analysis report (FSAR) and published documents. Copyright