Reliability prediction of an Ethernet Bus Interface Controller in a nuclear power plant simulator

Author

Lu, L. ; Dong, L.

Author_Institution

Fac. of Energy Syst. & Nucl. Sci., Univ. of Ontario Inst. of Technol., Oshawa, ON, Canada

fYear

2009

fDate

8-11 Dec. 2009

Firstpage

832

Lastpage

836

Abstract

Obsolescence presents great challenge to nuclear power plants (NPP) and plant simulators around the world. Old designs will have to be modified or replaced by new designs, in order to simplify maintenance, increase availability and meet ever-increasing operational and training requirements. Control system upgrade and distributed control system (DCS) design for both old plants and new builds have become the center of interest. This paper describes a new Ethernet bus interface controller (eBIC) used in the input/output (I/O) system of a nuclear power plant (NPP) simulator in Canada. The reliability of the eBIC is evaluated, and compared with the reliability of the existing bus interface controller (BIC). It is shown that the predicted failure rate of the new eBIC is five times lower than that of the existing system. This raises the level of confidence in the new design. The reasons for this improvement are also discussed.

Keywords

control engineering computing; distributed control; local area networks; nuclear power stations; power engineering computing; power generation reliability; Ethernet bus interface controller; distributed control system design; input-output system; nuclear power plant simulator; reliability prediction; Control system synthesis; Digital systems; Distributed control; Ethernet networks; Power engineering and energy; Power generation; Power system modeling; Power system reliability; Predictive models; Reliability engineering; Distributed Control System; Ethernet Bus Interface Controller; Mean Time between Failure; Nuclear Power Plant; Nuclear Simulator; Reliability Prediction;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, 2009. IEEM 2009. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Hong Kong

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4869-2

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-4870-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IEEM.2009.5372903

Filename

5372903