A Distributed Control and Monitoring System for Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of a distributed control and monitoring system for nuclear power plants. The N20 system is a distributed control and monitoring system based on the use of programmable controllers to perform all the logic and/or analog control and monitoring functions of a nuclear power station. The N20 distributed control and monitoring system is based on the following concepts: (1) safety and availability concept, (2) system architecture based on a three levels concept, and (3) communication network concept. The N20 system presents coherent solutions for the following problems adapted to each function of the plant control system: (1) for logic control and monitoring, safety is achieved through systematic redundant processing and self-checking while availability is achieved through possibility of down rated operation; (2) for analog control and monitoring, safety is achieved by self-checking procedures and freeze all outputs in case of fault detection; and (3) for the computer system, optimum availability is achieved by a hot standby configuration with a special automatic input/output bus reconfiguration technique for the connection of the remote processors.