Noise measurements performed at the Gösgen plant

In Work Package 4, actual plant data will be used to demonstrate the applicability as well as usefulness of the newly developed tools. Emphasis will be placed on the “detection” of abnormal fluctuations, on the understanding of their origin, and on the classification of the anomalies according to their safety impact.
Therefore, the demonstration of these tools depends on the availability of data from power reactors. Already existing data of different reactors provided by different project partners have been made available to the developers within CORTEX.
New measurements were also performed by TUEV Rheinland ISTec GmbH and TÜV Rheinland Industrie Service at the Gösgen nuclear power plant in Switzerland. These new measurements provide high resolution data at different burnup and boron concentration levels during different phases of the reactor cycle. The acquisition of neutron flux and temperature signals were performed by means of an industrial high-quality measuring system. The system consists of isolation amplifiers (with an optical connection to avoid any feedback to the plant signals), low-pass-filters (to avoid aliasing effects), signal compensation units (to compensate the DC-part), high precision signal amplifiers and the ADC-unit. This sophisticated measurement system is necessary, because the neutron noise is very small compared to the actual recordings of the neutron flux signals.

The data acquisition system SIGMA used for noise measurements at Gösgen

By Joachim Herb

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