Nuclear Reactor Inspection System

Bruce Power has one of the largest nuclear generating plants in North America. The facility has several large-scale reactors. These are generating power, and they do undergo a scheduled maintenance. During the periods of shut down, for safety reasons the fuel channels are inspected on a regular basis to verify their integrity and to ensure the safe operation of the power plant.

Before forming Blue Cog, I was honoured and fortunate enough to take a key role in the development of the BRIMS ANDE tool — a sophisticated ultrasonic probe, as well as eddy-current measurement techniques, used to scan the fuel channels of the nuclear reactor.

Streaming at 600 MB/s

The overall design of the system required the software to be capable of streaming vast amounts of collected data — around 600 MB/s — whilst preprocessing it using FPGA, as the tool head would rotate at speeds up to 1200 RPM. The collection was done for hours, as the tool needed to inspect multiple channels during a single outage. The data was later exported to formats that were analysed by the engineers responsible.

Our role

My role was to design major parts of the system from the perspective of data collection and storage, especially the aspects related to high-speed data acquisition and real-time FPGA processing.

The solution involved National Instruments equipment and four FPGA cards, which needed to do certain processing and run algorithms on the incoming data, stream the data to the main controller — which would then enable real-time display and interaction of all the captured channels — as well as stream the collected data set to disk at high speeds for further processing and offline analysis.

The project was a complex collaboration between multiple engineering firms. And is in use today.