Nuclear Power Station System

Emolice were retained to design and build a networked system of 50 control panels and monitoring infrastructure for commissioning of a system at a nuclear power station. The station (which is so vast that it’s as big as 380 full sized football pitches), currently has around 8,000 people working on it. The team at the station needed a way to be able to read and gather data from 50 industrial switches across the site and to monitor the position of the switches at all times from the control rooms.

This was a unique challenge, one that our team of engineers and technicians accepted eagerly. The team at Emolice went about creating an alternate SCADA system to be used across the 50 control panels (which were all made in our on-site assembly centre).

Programming

We created an alternative and cost effective version of a SCADA system, implementing M2M software across 50 control panels with inbuilt Unitronics Unistream PLCs. This allowed for a networked communication, which fed the data from the individual 48 control panels into two primary control panels stationed inside the two main control rooms. These were two separate control rooms stationed across the nuclear plant site. As the site is so large, they needed to be able to read and interact with the data in real-time and without sending lots of engineers out to manually check the switches.

Solution

The purpose of our engineered solution was to monitor the position of the individual switches on each of the machines. The positions and data from the switches is fed into the two control rooms for the power plant team to view 24/7. Additionally, if any issues were to arise in the switch position, our engineers coded an alert software into the PLCs which sends out a text message alert in real time to designated mobiles. This is fed into the control panel room also, where text or messages can be mirrored in both control rooms which are stationed on opposite sides if the site.

Not only did our software engineers construct all of the programming of the PLC integrated control panels, they also created customised icons for the power plant team to use and interpret the data quickly and easily. As a engineering software business, we at Emolice highly value our team’s expertise and prioritise consulting with our clients in order to create bespoke control panels or complete control systems, suited to all your needs.