Research and design of distributed fault diagnosis system in nuclear power plant

Abstract

Nuclear power plant (NPP) is a complex system with abundant operation data and various fault types. Moreover, in most cases, change of system parameters and prompt of the alarm system can not necessarily tell us directly what types the fault belongs to or where it lies in. When multiple faults occur, there is no one-to-one relationship between the fault symptom and the fault itself. Furthermore, the degree and response rate of the fault are different, so some faults are gradual and some are sudden. It is thus clear that for different faults, we need to conduct combined diagnosis with a variety of diagnostic methods to ensure accuracy and instantaneity in NPP fault diagnosis. According to the characteristic of the distributed function of equipment and the digital instrument and control (I&C) system, we studied and designed the distributed condition monitoring and fault diagnosis system in NPP. Based on the “disassemble-synthesizing” diagnostic idea, this paper proposed an intelligent diagnosis method which applied the fuzzy neural network (FNN) in doing local diagnosis and multi-source information fusion technology in global diagnosis. The simulation result showed that this method can quickly and accurately complete the tasks of diagnosing different levels of the single fault and different types of multiple faults.