ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY OF DIGITAL INSTRUMENTATION AND CONTROL SYSTEMS IN NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

摘要

Rising maintenance costs, coupled with a lack of spare parts for instrumentation and control (I&C) systems no longer supported by the original manufacturer, are leading to an increasing use of digital I&C equipment in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The potential for disruption of safety-related digital I&C systems by electromagnetic interference/radio-frequency interference (EMI/RFI) is an issue of concern for the nuclear industry. In the absence of significant operational experience, the best available indication of the potential vulnerability of advanced digital safety systems to EMI/RFI comes from environmental testing of an experimental digital safety channel (EDSC) by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The EDSC is a prototypical system representative of advanced reactor safety system designs with regard to architecture, functionality and communication protocols, and board and component fabrication technologies. An understanding of the electromagnetic environment to be expected for NPPs can be drawn from ORNL’s long-term survey of ambient results from these research efforts is reported in this paper. The lessons learned from the EMI/RFI survey and the EDSC tests contribute significantly to determining the best approach to assuring electromagnetic compatibility for the safety-related I&C systems in NPPs. EMI/RFI conditions at several plant sites. A summary of the