Use case 5: Nuclear power plant maintenance robot
Use case lead: ÚJV Řež
Contact: Ladislav Horacek
Stand description
The aim is to test the radiation stability of the inverter (UWB) and a commercially available laser rangefinder (as a radiation resistance is not provided by the manufacturer).
The stand consists of two parts:
- the irradiated installation (finally shielded by lead bricks – see Fig.2)
- the data processing part.
Figure 1a: Inverter.
Figure 1b: DC motor and laser rangefinder.
Figure 2: Irradiated installation.
The irradiated part consists of an inverter, a DC motor and a laser rangefinder (see Fig 1a, Fig.1b). A plastic eccentric is located on the motor. The rangefinder is aimed precisely at the eccentric surface so that the measured value is constantly changing.
As soon as the value stops changing, it is a signal to operator staff that something of the irradiated part failed, stopped working and the operator staff will perform failure root cause analysis.
Figure 3: Data processing stand.
Figure 4: The experiment is ready to be monitored remotely.
Part of the data processing stand (see Fig.3) consists of a B&R industrial computer and EtherCAT Weidmuller UR20 modules with an IO-Link reader card (laser rangefinder interface). There is also a power supply and terminal block. Aggregation and processing of measured data is ensured by the REXYGEN real-time control system. Every 2ms the value is read from the laser rangefinder and stored in the archive. The archive is set to a history of about 60 days (the limitation is due to the large amount of data and the size of the memory card used in the IPC).
Description of the remote access control program
The experiment is ready to be monitored remotely (see Fig.4) using the REXYGEN system user interface, which is available on a web server running on IPC. In this case, anyone connected (with login credentials) on the same subnet can observe the status of the experiment (running / failure). The invigilation is performed at three levels: accredited lab staff, UWB stand authors, UC5 management.
The final part of irradiation facility PANOZA with the experiment can be seen on video below.