FAULT DETECTION COVERAGE QUANTIFICATION OF AUTOMATIC TEST FUNCTIONS OF DIGITAL I＆C SYSTEM IN NPPS

Abstract

Analog instrument and control systems in nuclear power plants have recently been replaced with digital systems for safer and more efficient operation. Digital instrument and control systems have adopted various fault-tolerant techniques that help the system correctly and safely perform the specific required functions regardless of the presence of faults. Each fault-tolerant technique has a different inspection period, from real-time monitoring to monthly testing. The range covered by each fault-tolerant technique is also different. The digital instrument and control system, therefore, adopts multiple barriers consisting of various fault-tolerant techniques to increase the total fault detection coverage. Even though these fault-tolerant techniques are adopted to ensure and improve the safety of a system, their effects on the system safety have not yet been properly considered in most probabilistic safety analysis models. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an evaluation method that can describe these features of digital instrument and control systems.

Several issues must be considered in the fault coverage estimation of a digital instrument and control system, and two of these are addressed in this work. The first is to quantify the fault coverage of each fault-tolerant technique implemented in the system, and the second is to exclude the duplicated effect of fault-tolerant techniques implemented simultaneously at each level of the system's hierarchy, as a fault occurring in a system might be detected by one or more fault-tolerant techniques. For this work, a fault injection experiment was used to obtain the exact relations between faults and multiple barriers of fault-tolerant techniques. This experiment was applied to a bistable processor of a reactor protection system.