신뢰성과 유지보수를 위한 원자로보호계통 주기시험 방법 개발

RPS Periodic Testing Method for Reliability and Availability

The digital systems such as PLC or DCS have been applied to non-safety systems of nuclear power plants because of many difficulties in using analog systems. Nowadays, digital systems have been applied to safety systems of the plants such as reactor protection system. One of the main advantages of digital systems is applicability of automatic testing methods to the systems. The protection system requires high-reliability and high-availability because it shall minimize the propagation of abnormal or accident conditions of nuclear power plants. The calculation of reliability and availability of systems depends on the maintenance period of the system. In general, the maintenance period of the protection system is one-month in case of the manual test. However, the cycle of test can be shortened in several hours by using automatic periodic testing. The reliability and availability of the system is better when test period is shortened because the reliability and availability is inverse proportion to the test period. In this research, we developed the automatic periodic testing method for KNICS Reactor Protection System, which can test the system automatically without an operator or a tester. The automatic testing contained all functions of reaction protection systems from analog-to-digital conversion function of the bistable Processor to the coincident trip function of the coincident processor. By applying the automatic periodic testing to reaction system, the maintenance cost can be cut down and the reliability can be increased.