Reliability analysis of the reactor protection system with fault diagnosis

The main function of a Reactor Protection System (RPS) is to maintain the reactor core integrity and reactor coolant system pressure boundary. The RPS consists of the 2-out-of-m redundant architecture to assure a reliable operation. The system reliability of the RPS is a very important factor for the Probability Safety Assessment (PSA) evaluation in the nuclear field. To evaluate the system failure rate of the k-out-of-m redundant system is not so easy with the deterministic method. In this paper, the reliability analysis method using the binomial process is suggested to calculate the failure rate of the RPS system with a fault diagnosis function. The suggested method is compared with the result of the Markov process to verify the validation of the suggested method, and applied to the several kinds of RPS architectures for a comparative evaluation of the reliability.