• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.44 no.4
• /
• pp.421-428
• /
• 2012

Analog instrument and control systems in nuclear power plants have recently been replaced with digital systems for safer and more efficient operation. Digital instrument and control systems have adopted various fault-tolerant techniques that help the system correctly and safely perform the specific required functions regardless of the presence of faults. Each fault-tolerant technique has a different inspection period, from real-time monitoring to monthly testing. The range covered by each faulttolerant technique is also different. The digital instrument and control system, therefore, adopts multiple barriers consisting of various fault-tolerant techniques to increase the total fault detection coverage. Even though these fault-tolerant techniques are adopted to ensure and improve the safety of a system, their effects on the system safety have not yet been properly considered in most probabilistic safety analysis models. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an evaluation method that can describe these features of digital instrument and control systems. Several issues must be considered in the fault coverage estimation of a digital instrument and control system, and two of these are addressed in this work. The first is to quantify the fault coverage of each fault-tolerant technique implemented in the system, and the second is to exclude the duplicated effect of fault-tolerant techniques implemented simultaneously at each level of the system's hierarchy, as a fault occurring in a system might be detected by one or more fault-tolerant techniques. For this work, a fault injection experiment was used to obtain the exact relations between faults and multiple barriers of faulttolerant techniques. This experiment was applied to a bistable processor of a reactor protection system.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
• /
• v.22 no.1
• /
• pp.28-37
• /
• 2013

This paper presents a fault-tolerant control technique for wind turbine systems with sensor and actuator faults. The control objective is to maximize power production and minimize turbine loads by calculating a desired pitch angle within their limits. Any fault with a sensor and actuator can cause significant error in the pitch position of the corresponding blade. This problem may result in insufficient torque such that the power reference cannot be achieved. In this paper, a fault-tolerant control technique using a robust dynamic inversion observer and control allocation is employed to achieve successful pitch control despite these faults in the sensor and actuator. The observer based detection method is used to detect and isolate sensor faults by checking whether errors are larger than threshold values. In addition, the control allocation technique is adopted to tolerate actuator fault. Control allocation is one of the most commonly used fault-tolerant control techniques, especially for over-actuated systems. Further, the control allocation method can be used to achieve the power reference even in the event of blade actuator fault by redistributing the lost torque due to erroneous pitch position into non-faulty blade actuators. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulations with a benchmark model of the wind turbine.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.51 no.3
• /
• pp.692-701
• /
• 2019

Recently, instrumentation and control (I&C) systems in nuclear power plants have undergone digitalization. Owing to the unique characteristics of digital I&C systems, the reliability analysis of digital systems has become an important element of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). In a reliability analysis of digital systems, fault-tolerant techniques and their effectiveness must be considered. A fault injection experiment was performed on a safety-critical digital I&C system developed for nuclear power plants to evaluate the effectiveness of fault-tolerant techniques implemented in the target system. A software-implemented fault injection in which faults were injected into the memory area was used based on the assumption that all faults in the target system will be reflected in the faults in the memory. To reduce the number of required fault injection experiments, the memory assigned to the target software was analyzed. In addition, to observe the effect of the fault detection coverage of fault-tolerant techniques, a PSA model was developed. The analysis of the experimental result also can be used to identify weak points of fault-tolerant techniques for capability improvement of fault-tolerant techniques

• Journal of Power Electronics
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.131-145
• /
• 2015

The voltage-source inverters (VSI) supplying a motor drive are prone to open transistor faults. To address this issue in fault-tolerant drives applicable to electric vehicles, a new open transistor fault diagnosis (FD) method is presented in this paper. According to the proposed method, in order to define the FD index, the phase angle of the converter output current is estimated by a simple trigonometric function. The proposed FD method is adaptable, simple, capable of detecting multiple open switch faults and robust to load operational variations. Keeping the FD in mind as a mandatory part of the fault tolerant control algorithm, the FD block is applied to a five-phase converter supplying a multiphase fault-tolerant PM motor drive with non-sinusoidal unbalanced current waveforms. To investigate the performance of the FD technique, the fault-tolerant sliding mode control (SMC) of a five-phase brushless direct current (BLDC) motor is developed in this paper with the embedded FD block. Once the theory is explained, experimental waveforms are obtained from a five-phase BLDC motor to show the effectiveness of the proposed FD method. The FD algorithm is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA).

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.264-272
• /
• 1998

This paper proposes a fault detection and recovery mechanism for a fault-tolerant Mini-MAP system, and provides detailed techniques for its implementation. This paper considers the fault-tolerant Mini-MAP system which has dual layer structure from the LLC sublayer down to the physical layer to cope with the faults of those layers. For a good fault detection, a redundant and hierarchical fault supervision architecture is proposed and its implementation technique for a stable detection operation is provided. Information for the fault location is provided from data reported with a fault detection and obtained by an additional network diagnosis. The faults are recovered by the stand-by sparing method applied for a dual network composed of two equivalent networks. A network switch mechanism is proposed to achieve a reliable and stable network function. A fault-tolerant Mini-MAP system is implemented by applying the proposed fault detection and recovery mechanism.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.29 no.10A
• /
• pp.1113-1122
• /
• 2004

This paper is basically to achieve the high-availability and high-reliability of the control system from the implementation of the fault-tolerant system using the hot-standby sparing technique. To meet the objective, we design and implement a board with fault tolerance I/O bus to detect the fault. Warm-standby sparing technique is the fault tolerance technique usually used for switching control system in present. This technique can be easily implemented, but can not detect the fault quickly and can malfunction because of the hardware fault. The hot-standby sparing fault tolerant technique implemented in this paper is consists of dual processor modules and a I/O processor using fault tolerant I/O bus. The proposed method can find the faults as soon as possible, so it can prevent from wrong operation. Also it is possible to normal re-service due to the short recovering time. To implement the fault-tolerant dual system with fault detection be, two daughter, called FTMA and FTIA, boards designed and implemented are applied to the system. And we also simulated the proposed method to verify the high-availability and high-reliability of the control system using Markov process.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 1998.11c
• /
• pp.1037-1040
• /
• 1998

In this research a fault-tolerant and bumpless switching control is proposed for boiler systems used in the power plants. Firstly, three operating points are selected to control the nonlinear boiler through the full operational range, and the $H_{\infty}$ loop shaping controller and the model-based predictive controller(MBPC) are designed. To prevent the windup and bump problems which are caused by the actuator saturation and the controller switching, an anti-windup and bumpless transfer technique is adopted to the $H_{\infty}$ loop shaping controller. Also the constrained gain-scheduling technique is applied to MBPC to achieve the same objective. Secondly, the fault-tolerant control technique is proposed to continue the control action without stopping the boiler operation even in case of some faults. Through various simulation studies, the performances of the proposed control techniques are demonstrated.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics A
• /
• v.33A no.5
• /
• pp.188-202
• /
• 1996

In this paper, we propose a symmetrical pseudo faulty processing elements genration technique to improve the overall reliability of arrays with fixed hardware resources on the fault tolerant VLSI arrays based on single-track switches. We have analyzed the reliability of fault tolerant VLSI arrays and designed control logic for real-tiem reconfiguration. Applying this technique to reconfiguration of VLSI 2-D arrays, we have found that the proposed scheme achieves a higher reliability than the previus methods of similar condition. And we have found that the results of reliability analyzed by mathematic computation are very close to simulated ones. Furthermore, the time overhead for reconfiguration is independent of the array size because the control for reconfiguration is distributively executed by each processing elements. And the proposed scheme has an advantage which maintained properties of VLSI arrays by keeping the locality of interconnections as high as possible even after the reconfiguration.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 1998.11b
• /
• pp.689-692
• /
• 1998

In this research a fault-tolerant and bumpless switching control is proposed for boiler systems used in the power plants. Firstly, three operating points are selected to control the nonlinear boiler through the full operational range, and the $H_{\infty}$ loop shaping controller and the model-based predictive controller(MBPC) are designed. To prevent the windup and bump problems which are caused by the actuator saturation and the controller switching, an anti-windup and bump less transfer technique is adopted to the $H_{\infty}$ loop shaping controller. Also the constrained gain-scheduling technique is applied to MBPC to achieve the same objective. Secondly, the fault-tolerant control technique is proposed to continue the control action without stopping the boiler operation even in case of some faults. Through various simulation studies, the performances of the proposed control techniques are demonstrated.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 1998.11a
• /
• pp.369-372
• /
• 1998

In this research a fault-tolerant and bumpless switching control is proposed for boiler systems used in the power plants. Firstly, three operating points are selected to control the nonlinear boiler through the full operational range, and the $H_{\infty}$ loop shaping controller and the model-based predictive controller(MBPC) are designed. To prevent the windup and bump problems which are caused by the actuator saturation and the controller switching, an anti-windup and bumpless transfer technique is adopted to the $H_{\infty}$ loop shaping controller. Also the constrained gain-scheduling technique is applied to MBPC to achieve the same objective. Secondly, the fault-tolerant control technique is proposed to continue the control action without stopping the boiler operation even in case of some faults. Through various simulation studies, the performances of the proposed control techniques are demonstrated.