foliar analysis of natural deciduous tree species of basswood (tilia americana l.) (ba), american beech (acer grandifolia enrh) (be), and white ash (fraxinus americana l.) (wa) was carried out in 1994 in southern quebec. the diagnosis and recommendation integrated system (dris) was developed from the traditional method to find the preliminary norm and indices of n, p, k, ca, and mg for the ...

This paper describes a methodology to evaluate the radiological risk of postulated accident scenarios during the decommissioning phase of commercial nuclear power plants. The fuel damage scenarios include those initiated while the reactor is permanently shut down and the spent fuel is initially located in the reactor pressure vessel and successively moved in the spent fuel storage pool. This pa...

Commercial shipping of containerized goods involves certain risks for human safety and environment. In order to actively manage these risks, they must be identified, analyzed, modeled, and quantified. This requires a systematical analysis of design and operation of container vessels. Within the EU-funded research project SAFEDOR, a Formal Safety Assessment has been applied to establish the curr...

A study of 261 accidents involving domino effect has been carried out. The main features have been analyzed: origin, causes, consequences and most frequent sequences. The analysis has shown that the most frequent causes are external events (31%) and mechanical failure (30%). The storage areas (37%) and process plants (27%) are by far the most common places where domino accidents have occurred. ...

The design of instrumentation and control (I&C) systems for nuclear power plants (NPPs) is rapidly moving towards fully digital I&C systems and is trending towards the introduction of modern computer techniques into the design of advanced main control rooms (MCRs) of NPPs. In the design of advanced MCRs, human–machine interfaces have improved and various types of decision support systems have b...

Conventional fault tree analysis in safety analysis of complex engineering systems calculates the occurrence probability of the top undesired event using probabilistic failure rates. However, it is often very difficult to obtain those failure rates well in advance due to insufficient data, environment changing or new components. Fuzzy numbers can be applied to estimate failure rates by handling...

The performances of almost all available fault tree analysis tools are limited by the performance of the prime implicant computation procedure they use. All these procedures manipulate the prime implicants of the fault trees in extension, so that the analysis costs are directly related to the number of prime implicants to be generated, which in practice makes these tools di cult to be applied o...

Background: Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is one of the most common metabolic disorders in pregnancy, which is associated with serious complications. In the event of early diagnosis of this disease, some of the maternal and fetal complications can be prevented. The aim of this study was to early predict gestational diabetes mellitus by two statistical models including artificial neural ne...

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) as a Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) method is used to identify basic causes leading to an undesired event, to represent logical relation of these basic causes in leading to the event, and finally to calculate the probability of occurrence of this event. To conduct a quantitative FTA, one needs a fault tree along with failure data of the Basic Events (BEs). Sometim...

Though Twitter acts as a realtime news source with people acting as sensors and sending event updates from all over the world, rumors spread via Twitter have been noted to cause considerable damage. Given a set of popular Twitter events along with related users and tweets, we study the problem of automatically assessing the credibility of such events. We propose a credibility analysis approach ...