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Title: A preliminary user-friendly, digital console for the control room parameters supervision in old-generation Nuclear Plants

Abstract

Improvements in the awareness of a system status is an essential requirement to achieve safety in every kind of plant. In particular, in the case of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), a progress is crucial to enhance the Human Machine Interface (HMI) in order to optimize monitoring and analyzing processes of NPP operational states. Firstly, as old-fashioned plants are concerned, an upgrading of the whole console instrumentation is desirable in order to replace an analog visualization with a full-digital system. In this work, we present a novel instrument able to interface the control console of a nuclear reactor, developed by using CompactRio, a National Instruments embedded architecture and its dedicated programming language. This real-time industrial controller composed by a real-time processor and FPGA modules has been programmed to visualize the parameters coming from the reactor, and to storage and reproduce significant conditions anytime. This choice has been made on the basis of the FPGA properties: high reliability, determinism, true parallelism and re-configurability, achieved by a simple programming method, based on LabVIEW real-time environment. The system architecture exploits the FPGA capabilities of implementing custom timing and triggering, hardware-based analysis and co-processing, and highest performance control algorithms. Data stored during the supervisory phasemore » can be reproduced by loading data from a measurement file, re-enacting worthwhile operations or conditions. The system has been thought to be used in three different modes, namely Log File Mode, Supervisory Mode and Simulation Mode. The proposed system can be considered as a first step to develop a more complete Decision Support System (DSS): indeed this work is part of a wider project that includes the elaboration of intelligent agents and meta-theory approaches. A synoptic has been created to monitor every kind of action on the plant through an intuitive sight. Furthermore, another important aim of this work is the possibility to have a front panel available on a web interface: CompactRio acts as a remote server and it is accessible on a dedicated LAN. This supervisory system has been tested and validated on the basis of the real control console for the 1-MW TRIGA reactor RC-1 at the ENEA, Casaccia Research Center. In this paper we show some results obtained by recording each variable as the reactor reaches its maximum level of power. The choice of a research reactor for testing the developed system relies on its training and didactic importance for the education of plant operators: in this context a digital instrument can offer a better user-friendly tool for learning and training. It is worthwhile to remark that such a system does not interfere with the console instrumentation, the latter continuing to preserve the total control. (authors)« less

Authors:
; ; ; ; ; ;  [1]
  1. UTFISST, ENEA Casaccia, via Anguillarese 301, Rome (Italy)
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
OSTI Identifier:
22106050
Resource Type:
Conference
Resource Relation:
Conference: ICAPP '12: 2012 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants, Chicago, IL (United States), 24-28 Jun 2012; Other Information: Country of input: France; 16 refs.; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2012 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants - ICAPP '12| 2799 p.
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS; 42 ENGINEERING; ALGORITHMS; ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE; COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION; CONSOLES; CONTROL ROOMS; COPROCESSING; DIGITAL SYSTEMS; LOCAL AREA NETWORKS; MAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS; MONITORING; NEA; NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS; PROCESS CONTROL; PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES; REACTOR SAFETY; RELIABILITY; RESEARCH REACTORS; TRAINING; TRIGA-2-ROME REACTOR

Citation Formats

Memmi, F., Falconi, L., Cappelli, M., Palomba, M., Santoro, E., Bove, R., and Sepielli, M. A preliminary user-friendly, digital console for the control room parameters supervision in old-generation Nuclear Plants. United States: N. p., 2012. Web.
Memmi, F., Falconi, L., Cappelli, M., Palomba, M., Santoro, E., Bove, R., & Sepielli, M. A preliminary user-friendly, digital console for the control room parameters supervision in old-generation Nuclear Plants. United States.
Memmi, F., Falconi, L., Cappelli, M., Palomba, M., Santoro, E., Bove, R., and Sepielli, M. 2012. "A preliminary user-friendly, digital console for the control room parameters supervision in old-generation Nuclear Plants". United States.
@article{osti_22106050,
title = {A preliminary user-friendly, digital console for the control room parameters supervision in old-generation Nuclear Plants},
author = {Memmi, F. and Falconi, L. and Cappelli, M. and Palomba, M. and Santoro, E. and Bove, R. and Sepielli, M.},
abstractNote = {Improvements in the awareness of a system status is an essential requirement to achieve safety in every kind of plant. In particular, in the case of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), a progress is crucial to enhance the Human Machine Interface (HMI) in order to optimize monitoring and analyzing processes of NPP operational states. Firstly, as old-fashioned plants are concerned, an upgrading of the whole console instrumentation is desirable in order to replace an analog visualization with a full-digital system. In this work, we present a novel instrument able to interface the control console of a nuclear reactor, developed by using CompactRio, a National Instruments embedded architecture and its dedicated programming language. This real-time industrial controller composed by a real-time processor and FPGA modules has been programmed to visualize the parameters coming from the reactor, and to storage and reproduce significant conditions anytime. This choice has been made on the basis of the FPGA properties: high reliability, determinism, true parallelism and re-configurability, achieved by a simple programming method, based on LabVIEW real-time environment. The system architecture exploits the FPGA capabilities of implementing custom timing and triggering, hardware-based analysis and co-processing, and highest performance control algorithms. Data stored during the supervisory phase can be reproduced by loading data from a measurement file, re-enacting worthwhile operations or conditions. The system has been thought to be used in three different modes, namely Log File Mode, Supervisory Mode and Simulation Mode. The proposed system can be considered as a first step to develop a more complete Decision Support System (DSS): indeed this work is part of a wider project that includes the elaboration of intelligent agents and meta-theory approaches. A synoptic has been created to monitor every kind of action on the plant through an intuitive sight. Furthermore, another important aim of this work is the possibility to have a front panel available on a web interface: CompactRio acts as a remote server and it is accessible on a dedicated LAN. This supervisory system has been tested and validated on the basis of the real control console for the 1-MW TRIGA reactor RC-1 at the ENEA, Casaccia Research Center. In this paper we show some results obtained by recording each variable as the reactor reaches its maximum level of power. The choice of a research reactor for testing the developed system relies on its training and didactic importance for the education of plant operators: in this context a digital instrument can offer a better user-friendly tool for learning and training. It is worthwhile to remark that such a system does not interfere with the console instrumentation, the latter continuing to preserve the total control. (authors)},
doi = {},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/22106050}, journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2012},
month = {Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2012}
}

Conference:
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