A Redundant FPGA Based Controller for Subsea Blowout Preventer Stack

摘要

—A redundant Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) based controller for subsea Blowout Preventer(BOP) is presented. Triple modular redundancy techniqueis used for architecture design, since high reliability is anecessary requirement for subsea BOP control system. Amultiprocessor system is developed to enhance reliability ofthe processors and performance of the system. In addition,the shared memory method is applied to interchangeinformation between the processors. One processor isresponsible for communication, while the others runapplication programs. The proposed system has beenimplemented using three FPGA development boards, whichare connected to each other through RS-232 serial ports.Besides, the voting algorithms for discrete input, analoginput and discrete output are proposed. Functionalsimulation of the output voting is performed by using theQuartus II Simulator software. The results demonstratethat the proposed controller is able to tolerate faults, whichmeans it has extremely high reliability.