Reliability analysis of digital reactor protection systems in floating nuclear power plants

Abstract

This paper presents a reliability model for digital reactor protection systems (RPSs) in floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) that accounts for both the internal characteristics of RPS and the external environment. The internal characteristics of RPS include independent failures and common-cause failures (CCFs) of components, repair behavior, and actuation logic degradation. For the external environment, we incorporated a parts-pressure method and used the environmental factors to describe the impact of marine environment at component level. Detailed Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) algorithm was proposed to solve the reliability models with different environmental factors, and the results showed that the maximum value of the environmental factor was 3.2 under the requirements that the probability for RPS failing to generate the trip signal does not exceed 1 × 10−5 and the spurious trip frequency does not exceed one time per year. Reliability indexes, such as failure probability and spurious trip frequency, were also derived. The 90 % confidence intervals of these two indexes were further calculated in the uncertainty analysis by using the kernel density estimation (KDE) approach.