L-3 MAPPS announced today that it has completed two major projects in support of South Africa’s Koeberg Power Station. These accomplishments include the completion of the refurbished plant models for the legacy Koeberg operator training simulator and putting into service a second full scope simulator at the site on August 1, 2013.
The operator training manager at Eskom’s Koeberg station, Christo Lombaard, said: "The two projects in themselves were challenging, but it became clear that combining them would be beneficial to our overall project scheme.
"Considering Eskom’s objectives, including timing, the simulators to be ready concurrently with our new training centre, we are pleased with the L-3 technology and with the cooperation between Eskom and L-3 MAPPS, which has resulted in high-quality, state-of-the-art simulators at Koeberg."
The vice-president of marketing and sales for L-3 MAPPS power systems and simulation, Michael Chatlani, said: "L-3 MAPPS is extremely pleased with our performance and we look forward to continuing our support of Eskom for years to come.
"Following the putting into service of the Embalse full scope simulator in Argentina earlier this year, the Koeberg simulator deliveries in South Africa once again demonstrate that L-3 MAPPS is the world’s leading nuclear power plant simulation solution provider."
The refurbishment of the legacy simulator was rolled out in two phases. Phase I included providing L-3’s Orchid® simulation platform, remodeling of the balance of plant (BOP) process loop, simulation of the new Alstom Alspa Controsteam steam turbine controller, emulation of the core monitoring system display and provision of an interface to Westinghouse’s Ovation DCS. This enabled Koeberg to pretrain its operators for plant changes that followed in late 2010. Phase II consisted of upgrading the remaining plant models, including containment, emergency core cooling, electrical systems and common services in L-3’s Orchid modelling environment and migrating the legacy control logic into the Orchid modelling environment through a translator.
The second full scope simulator involved replicating the plant’s main control room and emergency control facility, driven by a compact modular input / output (I/O) system using Wago-I/O-system 750 hardware and L-3’s Orchid input output software. The new simulation platform and refurbished models were joined with the new second simulator’s hardware to facilitate validation and ultimate delivery to Eskom. As a follow-on effort, the legacy simulator’s I/O system will be replaced with the same compact, modular I/O system used on the second simulator.