Development of online validation and monitoring system for the thermal performance of nuclear power plant in service

The slow performance degradation and latent fault of equipment can't be easily seen form the raw measurements which may cause reduction of economy and unplanned outage. Real-time evaluation of thermal performance of the overall thermodynamic cycle system and its equipment, taking into account the deviation of hundreds of measurements, is also difficult. As a result, a validation and monitoring system containing online calculation model, database and user interface is developed. The model is built using EBSILON software and is assimilated with about 260 instruments' measured values every 5 min. The system was tested with about one year of historical operating data. The system can run well in most conditions with good consistency of measured values, and the Chi2-test ratio is less than one in more than 95% conditions. Most of the equipment in thermodynamic cycle system have good performance factor above 0.9 according to the historical data analysis.

Automated summary

The slow performance degradation and latent fault of equipment are difficult to detect from raw measurements, resulting in economic reduction and unplanned outage. A validation and monitoring system has been developed to evaluate the thermal performance of the overall thermodynamic cycle system and its equipment in real-time, taking into account the deviation of multiple measurements.