Design and development of Solar Powered Wireless Telemetering System (SPWTS) for Environmental Radiation Monitoring (ERM) of nuclear power plants

Presently, the real time environmental radiation monitoring system installed in the nuclear power plant is based on LAN. Generally data from the surveillance instrument are collected at regular intervals using a lap-top or system/units and taken to the laboratory for downloading the archival data. So a need was felt to design and develop Solar powered Wireless Telemetering System (SPWTS) for Environmental Radiation Monitoring (ERM) of Nuclear Power Plants. SPWTS is used for real-time monitoring and wireless transmission of the on-line data to the Central Control Unit (CCU) to investigate the history of monitored data. Thus, in this paper a wireless mode using Zigbee is proposed, thereby improving scalability, flexibility and continuous radiological surveillance along with data archival facility. The proposed Solar Powered Wireless Telemetering System (SPWTS) comprising of transmitter, intermediate devices and receiver units transmits the ERM data to Central Control Unit (CCU) for storage and display to RADAS unit. In order to meet the coverage distance without data loss, suitable number of repeaters/routers are configured and joined in the network. The entire wireless telemetry system is powered up by solar cells with rechargeable battery backup facility, SPWTS suitable for ERM data transmission module will replace the wired Ethernet environment by wireless mode thereby improving scalability, flexibility and continuous radiological surveillance of the gamma dose monitoring. This module also proposes solutions for wireless transmission of safety related critical data to a remote control unit. Finally, this module promotes interoperability within hierarchical framework by reducing the amount of changes that could be introduced into the existing system. (author)