Condition monitoring and false alarm reducing of sensors in NPP - 222
With more and more application of digital I and C systems in nuclear power plants (NPP), more and more sensors are also required. Large amount of sensors really can make contribution to the condition monitoring of systems and equipment in NPP, whereas the heavy use also increases the malfunction risk of sensor self. Therefore the reliability and effectiveness of sensors must be guaranteed first. Thus the condition of sensors should be monitored first in a NPP. Since the precise mathematical models of sensors in complex systems are relative difficult to establish, however quantity of operating data can be easily obtained due to the wide application of digital I and C systems, thus this article adopts principal component analysis (PCA) to carry out condition monitoring for sensors. The PCA model developed for sensors is proved to be effective with operating data acquired from a real NPP. It can detect and isolate the fault when an artificial fault is imposed to the normal data. Then the monitoring results are further processed by another control limit (second confidence limit) besides T 2 and Q statistics (first confidence limit) in PCA. The value of second confidence limit is calculated based on the probability statistics of T 2 and Q statistics. And simulation tests show that the application of the second confidence limit can greatly reduce false alarms in the PCA model and the model performance can be greatly improved with the application of false alarms reducing method. (authors)