Nuclear Power Station

The following pages are application notes for monitoring of a nuclear power station for abnormal trip conditions.

Introduction

On occasion, a nuclear power station may 'trip out' due to abnormal condition such as overloaded turbines, steam pressure build-up, or other conditions that may compromise the safety of such a plant. These conditions are expensive in terms of lost production and penalty points payed to the distribution grid. A system was set up using NP4000 instrumentation to monitor important parameters of the generating plant, and determine for later analysis the cause of a trip so that the plant could be modified so that it does not happen again.

Data Acquisition

A NP4000 series data acquisition unit was used with high resolution data acquisition cards installed. The cards contained all the signal processing electronics for direct connection to the thermocouples, pressure transmitters, LVDT's, alarm signals, and other outputs from the generating sets. An important consideration of using NetPod instrumentation was that each input was isolated to 1500V. A key factor in ensuring that the equipment itself will not cause a trip.

Post processing and analysis

The data from the NP4000 instruments was fed into a PC running DasyLab. Rather than logging continuously, and then manually scanning the data log for the abnormal event, a DasyLab worksheet was created that caused the abnormal event only to be logged, thus greatly simplifying the process of post analysis.