SDPS-D

(Distributed Safety Display Parameter System for Garoña Nuclear Power Plant)

INTRODUCTION

The safety criteria of nuclear power plants include the support of a Safety Parameters Display System (SPDS) during the normal and abnormal operation. The purpose of this system is to provide a reliable and continuous indication of the plant parameters and of the variables representative of its safety status, in order to enable the following of the Emergency Operation Procedure.

DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS

Basically the information showed was derived from the operation procedures. The appropiate transformation process was applied to the signals obtained from the data acquisition system.

The SPDS of the Nuclear Power Plant of Santa María de Garoña is based on signals provided by the data acquisition system. As an order of magnitude, the number of signals at source is 600 analogue and 900 digital signals, which, applying equivalence logic, are transformed into nearly 1200 parameters and variables to be represented.

The design of different screens include resource such as: analogue and/or digital representation, buttons, icons, windows, colors, diagrams, etc.

The navigation strategy between displays is intuitive and logical for the user. This interaction between screens is carried out by means of the use of the keyboard and the mouse.

The SPDS developed has an important differentiating characteristic which is its accessibility from any point in the company's local network, as well as from the control room. This capacity of distribution and visualization in different platforms has been caried out following the Client/Server model and making use of the facilities of the X-windows system.

Another novel aspect of the SPDS consists in the possibility of changing the source of information and using simulated values from the simulator previously developed by our group. This characteristic is of great importance for the training and learning of the operators in the use of the system itself, in the following of the EOP's and in the operation of the emergency drills periodically performed in the plant, which involve all the members of the organizations of the company and the official organisms of control.

Similarly, it is possible to visualize the real values registered from a certain instant, which is of great use in the analysis of events occurred, and in the training of operators. Thus, the system manages a data base created for this end. The availability of the above also enables statistical information on the parameters to be obtained. An auxiliary application was developed to validate the displays and the full system.

APPLICATION STRUCTURE

The application is divided into three modules. The mission of the first of them, called spdsd, is to act as an application server module. The purpose of the second, named spds.exe, is to operate as a client module. Finally, the plotterd module is dedicated to handling the printing of graphics.

Tha main function of the spdsd, the system server module, is to read permanently the information provided by the plant's data acquisition system. It is also dedicated to the transformation of the signals received according to the logic previously established. Hence, in every time interval, it deals with transferring these results to the shared memory. This module is developed in C and the UNIX curses library has been used for its interface in order to enable its portability to any terminal.

The main functions of the spds.exe, the client module, are: to read the data from the shared memory and show them by means of the screens designed for this purpose. This is basically a program developed with the DV-tools library of DataViews.

The plotterd module, dedicated to the handling of the printing of the variable evolution graphics, is a server module (daemon) which has been developed with the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) utility.

Comments to Pedro Corcuera:(mailto:corcuerp@unican.es