Thermal performance monitoring and diagnostics for nuclear power plant

In recent years, improving the reliable and economic operation, and the service lifetime of some important equipment has become a significant issue besides the construction of nuclear power plant. Almost all the countries which have nuclear power plant in the world, such as USA, France, and Japan, etc., have developed some kinds of expert systems to display the operating states of the plant and detect the potential malfunctions or failures, in which some methods for monitoring and diagnosis have been adopted, such as mechanical vibration, fatigue noise and radiation etc. The author proposes another method used for monitoring and diagnosis, i.e. thermal performance monitoring and diagnosis. The Thermal Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics System (TPMDS) gives information to operator and diagnoses the cause of a malfunction or predicts the trends of the malfunction through thermal parameters. The objective of this system is to assistant operator in plant control through man-machine inter-communications. The authors take Qinshan nuclear station as a research objection on the mechanism of TPMDS, and try to develop a prototype system to serve as an integrated computerized tool for plant safety and economic operation