Instrumentation and Control Activities At IGCAR
The PFBR is equipped with two independent, hardwired, diverse, fast acting shutdown systems to protect the reactor against neutronic and thermal incidents. The first drive mechanism, called control and safety rod drive mechanism (CSRDM), is connected to safety logic with fine impulse test (SLFIT) system. The second drive mechanism, called diverse safety rod drive mechanisms (DSRDM) is connected to pulse coded safety logic system . Both the safety logics perform two out of three majority voting logic. Since solid-state logic circuits are employed, extensive selfchecking is employed to ensure the healthiness of these circuits. The pulse coded safety logic system is a unique and diverse safety logic system, which is inherently fail-safe with built-in self-checking feature.
As part of safety related systems for PFBR, systems like Instrumentation and Control for primary sodium and special supervision systems like reactor & fuel handling startup and discordance supervision for control rods & SCRAM signals were developed. These systems are configured using dual redundant real time computer (RTC) system with switch over logic system. The control systems of control and safety rod drive mechanism, diverse safety rod drive mechanisms, transfer arm, inclined fuel transfer machine form the component handling systems.
Instrumentation and Control systems for secondary sodium, argon & nitrogen circuits, event sequence recorder, process disturbance analyzer are some of the non nuclear safety systems developed using single Versa Module Europa (VME) system or micro-controller based remote terminal units (RTU).
A state of the art distributed digital control system has been developed for PFBR to interconnect safety critical, safety related and non-safety Instrumentation and Control systems to the plant computers and in turn to operator display stations mounted on control room panels and console, through fiber optic LANs. The distributed digital control system software, for displaying plant information for monitoring and control, running on plant computers & GUI operator stations has been developed to run on Linux platform using open source tools, ensuring complete verification & validation.
Various development activities are being pursued towards upgradation of Instrumentation and Control systems for future FBRs. These include, development of core thermocouple probe with three thermocouples to simplify the core temperature monitoring system and m ake it in line with the safety criteria (independent and triplicate instrumentation for safety class-1), development of signal processing electronics suitable for placing in the roof slab top to reduce the requirement of large volume of signal routing from roof slab to the periphery. Development has been initiated to qualify thermocouples made by Indian industries as per the requirements of fast breeder reactors. Indigenous development activities are also initiated to manufacture leak tight penetration assemblies for electrical and Instrumentation and Control cables. Level measurement based on RADAR principle to simplify the level measurement in certain cases by mutual inductance technique, which is available for other fluids are tested for sodium application and found promising. High temperature fission chambers with a sensitivity of 1 cps/nv will be developed in association with BARC for deployment in future reactors in place of the present 0.2 cps/nv detectors being provided in control plug of PFBR. This will eliminate the under vessel fission chambers being provided in PFBR.
Read more about this topic: Indira Gandhi Centre For Atomic Research
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