Sharif Digital Repository

Various safety systems have been designed and developed in recent decades, but one of the most important issues is the improvement of safety of such systems and that is the goal of this research. In this thesis, while introducing different methods of designing an electronic system, we designed one of these safety systems: the Airbag system in accordance with ISO 26262 by considering standard requirements, prediction of potential hazards of the system, and its safe design at the system level. The designed system is capable of detecting the car crash in a precise and timely maner. The airbag will deploy within 45 milliseconds protecting the health and safety of occupants of the car and in... 

Station Blackout (SBO) involves Loss of Offsite Power (LOOP) concurrent with failure of the onsiteemergency ac power system. Although SBO is a beyond designbasis accident, in recent years this accident attracts a lot of attention. Fukushima nuclear accident which was initiated by earthquake followedby tsunami led to a SBO accident. In this thesis, Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) is applied to analyze SBO in IR-360 nuclear power plant and to compute its frequency. Meanwhile, weak points of the plant are identified in order to minimize the SBOprobability of occurrence. Fault tree method is used to evaluate emergency power system and offsite power system reliabilities. Common Cause... 

One of the most important aspects in the stability of arch dams which have been encountered, are the stability of the abutment. In order to assess the stability of wedge, Londe Method has been considered by simple assumption. Displacement and velocity of the wedge were calculated by Newmark beta method. In this study stability of abutment of Luzzone dam due to static and seismic loading was investigated. After modeling a finite element of dam-foundation-reservoir of Luzzone dam, the horizontal and vertical earthquake was applied to the model and the thrust force was recorded. By using a software stability safety factor of wedge was studied.it was found that the wedge is unstable and will... 

In recent years, machine learning techniques have been available to predict and interpret the structural behavior of dams. The main goal of this research is to predict structural behavior through modeling with data read by accurate instruments of dams. This requires the selection of several machine learning methods such as Random Forests (RF), Boosted Regression Trees (BRT), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Decision Tree Regression (DTR) algorithms. In this research, considering the 24 target variables defined from the detailed instrumentations studied, the behavior of the dam is modeled using selected machine learning models. These precision instruments... 

Successful deployment of the next-generation safety-critical systems (e.g., self-driving cars or assistive robots) requires certifying their safety during their operation. Therefore, there is an urgent need for developing safe controllers that respect the system’s constraints all the time. Safety, however, is the bare minimum requirement for any safety-critical system, and it is desired to design safe controllers that achieve as much performance as possible. Most existing results in the literature consider either optimal control design without safety specifications or safe control design with only short-sighted optimality. However, long-term optimality based on long-horizon optimization is... 

In general, release of hazardous gas in chemical process plants could be due to two reasons. First is failures due to degradation of components that have inventory of hazardous gas in standard process conditions, and the second is deviation of system from standard process conditions because of different failure modes of related components, e.g. controller equipments. The purpose of this study is, calculating the probability of H2S releasing in GS(03) plant of Arak Heavy Water factory, using PSA methods and its risk assessment. At First, fifteen groups of initiating events were identified with Hazop study for desired system. Then, for calculating the frequency of each event, the combination... 

Identifying driving behaviors and building an efficient and accurate driving behavior recognition model is of paramount importance for improving driving safety. Nowadays, with the ubiquity of smartphone sensors, many researchers are using smartphone sensory data to create models which forecast driving behaviors. This research introduces a logit model that predicts nine types of driving events using accelerometer and gyroscope sensors with an accuracy of 76 percent  

The 1991 NIOSH Lifting Equation (NLE) is widely used to assess risk of injury to the spine by providing estimates of the recommended weight limit (RWL) in hands. The present study uses two biomechanical models of the spine to verify whether the RWL generates L5-S1 loads within the limits (e.g., 3400 N for compression recommended by NIOSH and 1000 N for shear recommended in some studies).Severallifting activities are simulated here to evaluate the RWL by the NLE and the L5-S1 loads by the models. In lifting activities involving moderate to large forward trunk flexion, the estimated RWL generates L5-S1 spine loads exceeding the recommended limits. The NIOSH vertical multiplier is the likely... 

Nowadays, using smart buildings to improve performance and welfare of residents is of interest. Usually, these systems consist of safety systems that provide safety and security for residents. For example, fire detection system, sound the alarm and activating sprinkler in the building. For different types of critical events that can occur, variety of safety systems has been designed. Response time of these systems should be less than the deadline and the correct operation must be compeleted. As a result, analyzing and checking out the real-time and logical features of safety systems are the issues that we treat and investigate in this thesis.
In general, these systems are either... 

Drivers' behavior is an influential factor in more than 90% of driving accidents. Due to the increased traffic load due to the use of private cars, as well as traffic congestion restrictions for the use of private cars at large city centers, the use of public transportation means for transportation of goods and passengers in order to reduce traffic load is a very convenient option and it is sometimes necessary. Therefore, it is very important to examine the behavior and character of drivers of public urban vehicles in order to increase traffic safety. The purpose of this research is to present and develop a descriptive model that describes the behaviors leading to at-fault accidents for... 

The dams as one of the most costly and most fundamental infrastructure that human steps to make their, always paid special attention to people in different historical periods. According to the high cost of this structure, optimum design is so important. On other hand stability of structure as main aspects of the design that in the absence of it is threatening the lives of many people in downstream. Therefor the engineers consider two important aspect when they want to design a dam. The first step in designing is determinate the external loads. A designer not only must recognize this loads but also by using the material that he consume in the body of dams reach to a safety structure in During... 

Dam failures can result in massive property damages and a large loss of life. Safety management and risk assessment of dam failure have great significance to governments. Estimating the safety level of existing dams is an important part of dam safety management program in order to improve its safety and to achieve an acceptable level and to provide emergency action plans for probable failures. Reaching this goal requires a good sense of the actual condition of the dam, identification of hazards and selection of the appropriate scenario of safety level estimation in accordance with these conditions. In this way, prediction of life loss is an important factor that must be considered. This... 

There are different well-established strategies for making a process plant inherently safer. The benefits of applying these strategies on reducing the overall risk inside a plant are obvious. However, some of these changes are rejected many times because they appear to be too costly. But if the effects of applying inherently safer design strategies are investigated not only on the processing costs of a plant but also on the potential accident costs, the decision would in fact be different. In this paper an optimization procedure is proposed which integrates both processing and accident costs for different design schemes. In this procedure, some of the design variables are chosen with regard... 

In today's complex engineering systems, any increase in efficiency naturally comes with concerns about accepted level of safety. As demand for aerial transportation is increasing, more researches are conducted to increase the capacity of current controlled airspaces; as the limited capacity of the so called "en-route" corridors appears to be the main concern in the industry. Meanwhile, a solution is expected to be in more efficient exploitation of the current airspace capacities via optimizing the standards related to maintaining Separation Minima (SM) among flying aircrafts. Current standards assume an aircraft to be at the center of a circle with a radius equal to 5 nm. In this work,... 

Ultralight aircraft (VLA category) are usually piloted by novice pilots under Visual Flight Rules (VFR). In this work, we demonstrate how newly developed techniques in robotics could be used to enhance flight safety in this category of aircraft, especially during landing around sunset. In this research we have investigated the ability of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithms in low level flight just before touch-down. Different case-studies show that SLAM algorithm is efficient in detecting the runway threshold. Comparing five different methods of parameterizations for landmarks detection including: (1) Plucker, (2) Anchored Plucker, (3) Homogeneous, (4) Anchored... 

Transfer of Spent Nuclear Fuel from reactor building to storage facilities is one of the most important operations at Front End of Nuclear Fuel Cycle. The aim of this project is to calculate the risk of the radioactive materials release into the environment during various stages of spent fuel transfer operations. In addition, the contribution of each of the initiating events in total release probability were also determined. For this purpose, Probabilistic Risk Assessment method which is usually used in safety evaluation of the nuclear facilities, is applied. The main tools used in this method are event tree and fault tree. In this study, SAPHIRE software has been used to construct the event... 

This research is focused on domino accident risk assessment. Domino accidents are such events wherein one accident in a process unit becomes the cause of another (and at times yet another and still other) accident. Domino or knock-on accident is not an infrequent occurrence in process industries. In this research an inventory of the major process industry accidents involving ‘domino effect’ is presented. 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... 

Performing a safe and effective endoscopic sinus and skull based surgery (ESSS), requires special training programs to gain sufficient hand-eye coordination and instrument manipulation skills. In this regard, virtual-based haptic surgical training systems have been considered among the medical students and residents as an effective approach for training practices. Therefore, in this study, the development of a haptic training system for ESSS, based on an animal model has been addressed. By conducting various indentation and relaxation experiments, mechanical properties of the specific sino-nasal regions of sheep head, as a function of force, displacement and tool insertion rate, for three... 

As Ethylene Oxide is a highly toxic, flammable, and hazardous material, the consequences of any malfunction in an Ethylene Oxide reactor may be irreparable. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the probable consequences of an accident in Morvarid Petrochemical Co.’s Ethylene Oxide Reactor in order to find probable hazardous scenarios. In this project, probable accidents were modelled and evaluated by Phast software in different scenarios, and the outcomes were investigated. In addition, if necessary, a set of solutions were proposed to decrease casualties in hazardous scenarios. The results may be used to change layouts according to Consequence Modelling. Results illustrated that... 

operation of a nuclear power plant. Therefore, constant monitoring of the reactor core with reliable methods is important. To monitor the reactor heart, it is necessary to estimate and calculate some parameters, with high speed and accuracy, such as power distribution inside the heart, reactivity feedback coefficients, PPF, DNBR, etc. Analytical methods are often used to calculate these parameters, which in case of failure of the sensors, the calculations will be practically disrupted, and the method used in this research can solve these problems by losing a small amount of accuracy.In this study using real data of Bushehr nuclear power plant (BNPP) and by soft computing methods and...