Simulator company L-3 MAPPS announced that it has successfully refurbished the operator-training simulator at South Africa's Koeberg nuclear station. The company has also put a second simulator into service at the site for plant operator Eskom.
The refurbishment of the legacy simulator involved remodelling the balance of plant (BOP) process loop, simulation of the new Alstom steam turbine controller, emulation of the core monitoring system display and provision of an interface to Westinghouse's Ovation DCS. The work was carried out to pre-train operators for a plant upgrade/uprate carried out in 2010.
The second phase of the project involved upgrading the remaining plant models, including containment, emergency core cooling, electrical systems and common services in L-3's Orchid Modeling Environment, and migrating the legacy control logic into the Orchid Modeling Environment through a translator.
Installation of the second full scope simulator was completed in August 2013. Work involved replicating the plant's main control room and emergency control facility driven by a compact modular input/output (I/O) system and L-3's Orchid Input Output software.
As a follow-on effort, the legacy simulator's I/O system will be replaced with the same compact, modular I/O system used on the second simulator, according to L-3.
"The two projects in themselves were challenging, but it became clear that combining them would be beneficial to our overall project scheme," said Christo Lombaard, operato- training manager at Eskom's Koeberg station.
Koeberg is a twin pressurized water reactor station with a total capacity of 1840 MWe (gross). It is the only nuclear power plant on the African continent.
Photo: The second Koeberg simulator ready for operation (Source: L-3 MAPPS)
