2019 IEEE 4th Advanced Information Technology, Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IAEAC 2019)

A Design of Nuclear Power Monitoring

Communication Control Module Based on
Redundancy Technology
Liquan Liu1,2,Longqiang Zhang1,Junfeng Lan2,Rongzhen Xia2,Chengrui Dai2,Liang Zhou1,Guanchen Li1
1
State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Power Safety Monitoring Technology and Equipment,Shenzhen,Gangdong,518045,China;
2
Beijing Microelectronics Technology Institute,Beijing,100076,China .
[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],136
[email protected],[email protected]

Abstract—By using large number of analog devices for

monitoring in nuclear radiation area ,the scale of central II. COMMUUNICATION CONTROL MODULE BASED ON
control system is too large and the circuit has safety hazards. REDUNDANCY TECHNOLOGY
To solve the shortcomings, a nuclear power monitoring
communication control module based on redundancy A. Nuclear power intelligent monitoring platform structure
technology was developed. The module performs the At present, intelligence and centralization are the
communication between the central control system and field
development trend in the field of nuclear power monitoring.
monitoring units through a preset protocol. The data and
Therefore, higher requirements are put forward for the
instructions can be transmitted by only one data bus. And it
improves the complicated connection between the central
function of the communication control module between the
control system and the underlying device. The stability and central control PC software and the underlying equipment.
continuity of data transmission is ensured by the redundancy The structure of the radiation-resistant nuclear power
techniques and polling mode for the underlying devices on the monitoring platform based on this study is shown in Figure 1.
bus. The simulation of the failure situation of the board during The whole monitoring platform includes four parts: Profibus-
actual operation is carried out and the results verify the DP master station, host computer configuration module,
effectiveness of the communication control module based on communication control module and field monitoring units.
redundancy technology developed in this paper.

Keywords—redundancy technology, communication control,

nuclear power plant, radiation-resistant system

I. INTRODUCTION
Safety is the core issue of the nuclear power industry.
Therefore, monitoring the operation and status of nuclear
power plant equipment is very important to ensure the safety
of nuclear power production. However, the nuclear power
plant system is complex and large in scale, so it is not easy to
obtain huge monitoring parameter information[1-2].With the
popularity of digital control systems in the nuclear power
industry, a large number of communication protocols and
various data transmission modules are used in the
instrumentation and control systems of nuclear power
plants[3-5]. The performance of electronic components in the
radiant area has to meet high requirements [6-8].
Therefore，the structure of the nuclear power plant control
system is mainly based on centralized control and centralized
monitoring. This has resulted in a large-scale central control
system and is more sensitive to cable over-capacity problems.
The reliability of the entire monitoring system during data
transmission is difficult to guarantee. Decentralized control Fig. 1. The structure of the radiation-resistant nuclear power monitoring
and centralized monitoring will become the development platform
trend of the current digital control system for nuclear power
plants in the future. Based on the application requirements In the whole system, the communication control module
and application environment of an advanced pressurized is responsible for the connection between the top-level
water reactor unit in China, this paper studied a central control system and the underlying field monitoring
communication control module that can combine the units. For example, as the slave station communicates with
redundancy technology with the communication work of the the master station in the Profibus-DP protocol, and as the
nuclear power monitoring platform. RS422 master station transmits work configuration
commands to the corresponding underlying field monitoring
units.

978-1-7281-1907-6/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 2229

 Since several field monitoring units controlled by the RS485 communication module with the ADM2486 ,
communication control module are in the radiation area, it is Profibus-DP communication module with the VPC3+c.
necessary to use a chip with anti-irradiation function to
ensure normal operation. This module is suitable for the The power module circuit of the communication control
RS422 anti-irradiation bus used by the system's field module is shown in Figure 3. The externally input 24V
monitoring units. Compared with other expensive anti- voltage is converted to 5V voltage by the isolated voltage
irradiation bus components such as Spacewire and 1553B conversion chip, and then the voltage required by each
bus, this module has the characteristics of simple and module is output through the linear regulator chip.、
effective, low economic cost, etc., which can meet the
requirements of nuclear power plant environment. Related
work requirements can greatly save research and
development costs.

B. Communication control module overall design

The typical working form of redundancy technology is
the physical repetition of hardware. For example, the
hardware structure of the master module and the slave
module is adopted. After the system is started, the master
module works first. Once the master module fails, the slave
module becomes the master module to guarantee that the
system is operating normally.
The block diagram of the nuclear power intelligent
monitoring communication control module based on the
redundancy technology is shown in Figure 2. The whole
communication module consists of the master module and
the slave module.The two modules communicate with each
other through the UART interface on the MCU to implement
data reception and command configuration. After the
configuration is completed, the master module starts to read
and write the data of relevant field monitoring unit on the
RS422 bus, and sends the received data to the slave module
by using the UART interface. Then the two modules send the
data to ProfiBus-DP master station through their respective Fig. 3. Power module circuit
communication protocol conversion circuits.
Figure 4 shows the RS485 communication module.
Since the RS485 communication module is connected to the
Profibus-DP bus of the entire monitoring system, the isolated
RS485 communication chip ADM2486 is selected to avoid
the impact of the board short circuit and other faults on the
data bus.

Fig. 2. The structure of the radiation-resistant nuclear power monitoring

platform

C. Hardware part design

The hardware circuit part of the communication control
module is mainly divided into the following parts:
STM32F103 core control module, isolated DC-DC chip and
AMS-1117 voltage regulator chip, RS422 communication
module consisting of B26C31CERHD and B26C32CERHD,

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 Fig. 4. RS485 communication module module and stops its operation through the reset mechanism
of FIG. 5.
Figure 5 is a schematic diagram of the master slave
configuration circuit. The reset pin M_RESET of the master
module MCU is connected with the button and the transistor Detection as the master module
2N3904. When the master module sends a reset request to
the slave module or the master module does not reply to the Configure the field monitoring units
heartbeat communication request of the slave module for a based on the received data
long time, the slave module IO port S_PA1 outputs a high
level. The triode is turned on and the reset pin is pulled low
to stop the work of master module. Send Y
response Whether to receive
code to the the detection code from slave
slave module
module
N
Periodically polling based on
information in FLASH

Send 422 bus

error code to N Determine if the
the slave 422 bus is normal
module
Y

Send the collected data to the slave module

for backup and to the Profibus-DP master
station finally

Fig. 5. master slave configuration circuit (a) master module program flow

D. Software part design

Power on
The master module program flow is shown in Figure 6(a).
In the default state, the master module receives the
configuration information such as the online address, board Receive configuration information sent by the
master module through the UART interfaceand
type, effective channel and PID parameters sent by the host store it in FLASH
computer configuration module through the RS232 circuit
and stores it in the FLASH. The configuration information is Whether to receive
Y
then sent to the slave module using the UART interface to the 422 bus error code from
guarantee consistency and synchronization of the received master module
instructions.The configuration information such as Analog
N
Output (AO) and Digital Output (DO) sent by the ProfiBus- Reset
DP bus master through the RS485 circuit is sent to the the Periodically send the detection code to
corresponding field monitoring unit. The heartbeat master master module
module
communication response signal is then sent to the slave
module. The master module periodically polls the field
monitoring unit according to the configuration information to N Whether to receive response
determine that the RS422 bus can work normally. The signal from master module
collected data is then sent to the slave module for backup and
to the Profibus-DP master station finally. If the current
RS422 bus fails, the master module will send an RS422 error Y
code to the slave module and requests a work switching receive the collected data from master
immediately. module for backup and to the Profibus-DP
master station finally

The program flow of the slave module is shown in

Figure6(b). The slave module receives the configuration data
of the master module through the UART interface and stores (b)The program flow of the slave module
it in the FLASH. Then it periodically check whether the
master module sends error code when RS422 bus is faulty. If Fig. 6. The program flow of the control module
receiving the signal of the current bus fault of the master
module, the slave module immediately resets the master

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 To prevent the master module from malfunctioning during By powering off the master module while the system is
operation, the slave module periodically performs heartbeat running, modifying the response code set in the program and
communication with the master module to determine if it is disconnecting the RS422 interface of the master module to
working. The program is shown in Figure 7. First, after simulate the master module fails and the 422 bus are faulty.
receiving the detection code, the master module first The keil5 software and the host computer software of master
determines whether the data reception is normal according to station show that the Profibus-DP bus link is always
the header of the data frame and the end of the data frame. connected normally, and the data received by the MCU and
After the verification is correct, the function and data code the host computer is consistent with the sending of the field
are stored in an array. It then checks if the function code is a monitoring units, as shown in Figure 8.
heartbeat communication check function. If it is the current
function, the software will calculate whether its cyclic
redundancy check code (CRC) is the same as the received
checking code according to the corresponding data. If the
calculation result is correct, the master module sends a
response signal to the slave module, otherwise it sends an
error code. The slave module will reset the master module
and stop its work immediately after receiving the error code
from the master module.

The master module receives the detection

code from the slave module

Check the beginning and

end of the data frame

The checking code ,function code ,and data

code are stored in an array

(a)keil 5 receiving display

Perform N Determine whether the
other function code is the heartbear
functions communication function

Calculate the
corresponding check code
(b) the host computer of master station receiving display

send an error N Determine whether the

code to slave actual check code is the same as
module the calculate value (b) host computer software receiving display

Fig. 8. Simulated communication failure test results

Y
The master module sends a response
signal to the slave module IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the communication control part of the
nuclear power plant monitoring system is designed by using
Fig. 7. The program flow of heartbeat communication redundancy technology. The reliability of the orderly
communication between the host computer and the field
monitoring unit is guaranteed by the communication between
III. VERIFICATION OF COMMUNICATION CONTROL the two MCU and the polling mechanism of the bottom field
MODULE monitoring unit.
Aiming at the problems that may occur in the system It can be seen from the test results that the
communication link, several rounds of complete systematic communication control module can complete the command
tests are conducted to detect the module's ability to identify configuration and data transmission through the anti-
and respond to faults by artificially simulating the irradiation RS422 bus. And after the failure of the master
corresponding faults. module, the slave module can automatically take over the
work to guarantee the normal operation of the entire system.

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Detection Technology 31.8(2011):908-907.
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