Keywords:

OPERATION, NNS, SUPERVISION, CORE, REACTOR, VARIABLE, PLANT, Fault supervision,

nuclear research reactor, research reactor

Digest:
...Annals of Nuclear Energy 185 (2023) 109684 Available online 11 February 2023
0306-4549/c 2023 Elsevier Ltd....
...Fault supervision of nuclear research reactor systems using artificial neural
networks: A review with results Nourddine Khentout a, Giovanni Magrotti b a Centre
de Recherche Nucl´eaire de Birine, Djelfa, Algeria b University of Pavia, Pavia,
Italy A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Fault Detection Diagnosis Fault Monitoring
Accommodation Supervision Data Driven Techniques Artificial Neural Networks A B S T
R A C T On-line condition supervision of nuclear reactor (NR) is of major concern
and high-priority task during operation to ensure safe operation of systems....
...Usually, faults can occur in different locations at any time....
...The task of supervision is to monitor the normal operation, and in the case of
faults, it has to detect, diagnose them earlier and take appropriate decision, as
correction, before they provoke damage to the plant....
...The actual paper presents the current state of research in the monitoring and
decision-making field....
...It gives a review of fault supervision applications in dynamic, non-linear,
complex, and sometimes not well known systems, such as those of NRs; and the
important used methods, particularly neural networks (NNs)....
...The aim of this paper is the proposal of a fault supervision application based
on NNs of some nuclear and thermo-hydraulic critical variables in Applied Nuclear
Energy Laboratory (LENA) NR systems such as the core and hydraulic circuits....
...The test results show that NN approach estimates successfully the selected
variables with early detection, identification and accommodation of faults in real-
time, over a wide power range of operation including start-up, shutdown and steady
state....
...Finally, the application of the developed model may be extended to other
variables and different NR systems....
...During operation, faults, errors, malfunctions, failures and anomalies
occurrence; perturbation; and noise can easily affect the overall performance of NR
systems and lead to unwanted operations and even to a complete shutdown which
results in loss of economy....
...Maintaining these criterions at an acceptable level are extremely important and
key concerns for any nuclear plant during its operation life, which means a total
domination on the reactor power control, fuel cooling, and radioactivity
surveillance....
...All these measurements, as variables or parameters, from many different S/D
channels are mainly used in operations, control, radiation protection, and
monitoring of systems and processes....
...Seen the huge number of the used S/Ds, the plant data acquisition system
generates, at every moment, lot of conditions/variables as signals or data and
present them, constantly as plant condition, in the main control room....
...In such case, on-line management of the acquired data, in normal operation and
emergency, is quite hard and a real defy for operators (mental pressure and wrong
operations) and Expert Systems (ESs)....
...To operate optimally plant systems and processes, it is of great significance to
introduce permanently, over time, enhancements through the use of efficient and
recent algorithms in the field of quality, availability, reliability and safety....
...On the other hand, the economic growth and technological competition requires
changing intervention strategies which can be done by using modern plant
supervision and management....
...In this context, it is advantageous to seek towards preventive and condition-
based maintenance and calibration; on-line monitoring, Fault Detection (FDe), Fault
Diagnostic or Diagnosis (FDi) and prognosis; particularly when it concerns status
and performance of components, Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Annals of
Nuclear Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/anucene
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2023.109684 Received 8 June 2022; Received in
revised form 30 December 2022; Accepted 3 January 2023 Annals of Nuclear Energy 185
(2023) 109684 2 instrumentation, equipment, and systems during operation....
...During last decades, different studies were presented on FDe and FDi, often
known as FDD or Fault Monitoring (FM); using artificial intelligence, also known as
machine learning or soft computing, and mostly artificial neural networks, often
simply called Neural Networks (NNs)....
...The purpose of this study is to review the FM methods and tools, particularly
NNs, to design practical faulty free models for FS procedure to be exploited in
NRs....
...This procedure allows a quickly Fault Detection and Identification (FDI), and
corrective action in case of faults....
...Although, on-line FS typically must be applied to all types of NR systems, but
seen the space limitation, this article is restricted to some critical signals of
the core and Heat Exchanger (HE), as prototype, since they are the most commonly
monitored....
...While, this methodology can be generalized on all other NR systems and
processes, given its independence from the historic, nature and dynamics of the
variable to be supervised....
...One popular methods used in FS is based on Data-Driven Techniques (DDTs) and has
been the subject of many researches....
...Among these methods, NNs have emerged as potential tool and has been
demonstrated their capability (Shen et al., 2002)....
...During last decades, there has been a growing attention and interest to the use
of NNs....
...NNs have been successfully applied to ease some operating difficulties of
nuclear plant and ameliorate their performances especially, safety, reliability and
operability....
...They have been applied with a great benefit to FM (Venkatasubramanian and Chan,
1989, Kourd et al., 2013) and fault correction schemes (Napolitano et al.,
2000)....
...More than that, NNs have become a sort of powerful, even ideal tool for FM
(Ab....
...The excellence of this application appears, particularly, when robust fault
tolerant, a good classification, intelligent decisions and recognizing faulty
component patterns are needed to be achieved in a real-time with higher degree of
accuracy....
...Sec. 3 explains fundamental theoretical aspects of some nuclear and
thermohydraulic variables supervised in this paper....
...Sec. 5 gives generalities on NNs, Sec....
...It operates at 250 kW and has been exploited for various usages such as
production of radioisotopes, nuclear activation analysis, etc....
...On the other hand, the power reading of a NR is made continuously by direct
measurement of the average core flux using neutron detectors....
...At LENA NR, the power is monitored by four distinct neutron-sensitive detectors
placed outside the graphite reflector enclosing the core....