Quantitative common cause failure modeling for auxiliary feedwater system involving the seismic-induced degradation of flood barriers

Abstract

Flood barriers are important defenses which will reduce the internal flood-induced failure risk of safety-related equipment in the turbine building. Contrarily, the degradation of flood barriers will increase the risk of internal flood-induced common cause failure (CCF). Two layouts of auxiliary feedwater pumps system are compared to demonstrate the quantitative risk assessment of the possible degradation of flood barriers. The alpha decomposition method has been developed by the authors in order to quantitatively evaluate the CCF parameters based on the causal inference. Occurrence frequency and CCF triggering ability are two important elements which will decide the CCF risk significance of potential common causes. The seismic-induced internal flood combining with the degradation of flood barriers is analyzed. The degradation of flood barriers is treated as a stochastic process and a Markov model is applied to consider the time-dependent states. The failure time of three auxiliary feedwater pumps is calculated based on the water flow rate through flood barriers. CCF triggering abilities of internal floods are calculated which are represented as decomposed alpha factors. This article shows the updating process of CCF parameters according to Bayesian inference and hypothetical databases. It is concluded that the issue of CCF modeling is not only decided by the number of redundant components but also decided by causes and plant-specific design.