The Design of a Solid State Trip System for Nuclear Power Plants

In this paper, a new nuclear safety system has been devised that promises a great reduction in the unavailability of conventional systems of compatible arrangement. Four principal design approaches are combined to realize this improvement. The first is the employment of solid state devices throughout the system for achieving not only a much faster system response, but also a better reliability. The second involves the application of sequential redundancy, so that the effective system operation can be maintained by a standby unit in the event of a failure in the principal system. The third approach employs the concept of cellular automata in failure detection and switching functions. Finally, the fourth design approach provides an automatic shift from 2 out of 3 to 2 out of 2, whenever a channel is rejected.