Practical Alarm Suppression Rules and their Implementation for Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

-It is necessary to adopt some logical techniques and methods of alarm processing for a large complex plant such as nuclear power plants in order to present the occurred alarm messages properly and concisely. Among such alarm processing techniques, the alarm suppressing function is a strong tool to avoid alarm flooding during the sudden transients of plant output power such as turbine trips, reactor trips and other incidents. Unless any suppression or representation technologies are used in an alarm message listing system, it cannot provide quick assistance to plant operators or supervisors during plant upsets because too many alarm messages are presented in an alarm list window. This paper presents the key suppression methods and analysis processes developed for implementing a suppressed alarm message listing function of an integrated alarm system called LogACTs which has been applied to a CANDU nuclear power plant. A simulation testing of the suppressing function conducted with the real plant alarm message list data has demonstrated an effective performance of the developed logics with the high suppression rate.