Controller for nuclear power plants

Triple modular redundant Tricon system simplifies licensing process, enables easier nuclear modernisation projects

Version 10 of Invensys's Triconex® Tricon® controller has been approved for use in safety-related nuclear power plant instrument and control applications by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In a Safety Evaluation Report (SER) dated April 12, 2012, the NRC indicates that the latest version of the Tricon controller can now be used in safety-related (1E) applications, like reactor protection systems, in U.S. nuclear power plants and U.S. Department of Energy facilities that require licensing or oversight by the NRC. It is the first controller from a dedicated automation vendor to achieve such certification from the NRC and it remains the only triple-modular-redundant system to be qualified.

“The Triconex Tricon system is extremely important to us as we continue to migrate to digital technology, while providing safe, clean, reliable power to our customers in California,” said Scott Patterson, program manager for I&C obsolescence for Pacific Gas & Electric, which operates the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “Partnering with Invensys, an automation vendor whose core competency is safety systems, gives us an additional layer of protection as we upgrade older safety-related equipment. NRC certification means we can move forward with modernising and optimising our plants to ensure their continuous safe operation. We are confident this technology will enhance future upgrades and new designs, as well as ease the licensing process.”

The Tricon controller’s state-of-the-art fault tolerant, triple-modular-redundant—TMR—architecture removes single points of failure by integrating three isolated, parallel control systems and extensive diagnostics into one system. The system uses two-out-of-three voting to provide high-integrity, error-free, uninterrupted process operation. True TMR is the only such technology certified by the NRC. The Commission’s SER encompasses the Tricon controller’s software and hardware, including termination panels, chassis, power supplies, main processor modules, communication modules, input/output modules and interconnecting cabling.


"In 2002, the NRC certified an earlier version of our Tricon controller, and since that time we have made a number enhancements,” said Clayton Scott, chief nuclear officer, Invensys Operations Management. “We sought this unprecedented second certification so that we can continue to deliver the industry’s most reliable safety controller, helping our customers produce the safest, most reliable energy possible. Enabled by our Triconex technology, our nuclear customers can now apply Tricon controllers in both their existing fleet and new builds. This certification will be of tremendous value to the fleet of U.S. nuclear plants that require modernisation. It also sets a new standard for control and safety excellence for the global nuclear industry.”

“Partnering with Pacific Gas & Electric and the Diablo Canyon team to renew nuclear safety certification for the Tricon controller gives other nuclear plants wanting to modernise their safety systems and meet the latest regulatory guidelines a strong point of reference,” said Harry Forbes, senior analyst with ARC Advisory Group. “The NRC’s approval enables other nuclear power plants to expedite their system modernisation plans with shorter schedules and more predictable project costs. ARC believes the Tricon controller will help nuclear power plants globally migrate to digital control with a simplified licensing process.”

Invensys leads the market when it comes to overall safety shutdown systems. As one of the world’s most rigorously evaluated control systems, more than 10,000 Tricon controllers are in use today in safety and critical control applications worldwide, and they have collectively amassed more than 650 millions of hours of operation without failure upon demand.

Automation system for Russian refinery

Automation systems to drive control, environment and safety excellence at Saratov refinery

Invensys Operations Management has signed two contracts with TNK-BP, the third largest oil company in Russia and among the top 10 private oil companies in the world by production volumes.

Under the terms of the agreements, Invensys will provide comprehensive automation solutions and services to help drive control, environment and safety excellence at TNK-BP’s Saratov oil refinery in western Russia. The 7 million tonnes per year refinery markets more than 20 products, including high-quality gasoline, low-sulphur diesel, naphtha, vacuum gas oil, fuel oil and bitumen.

Invensys will supply its Foxboro® I/A Series® distributed control systems and Triconex® emergency shutdown and critical control systems, as well as Foxboro measurement, instrumentation and control devices for the refinery’s hydrofining and isomerisation units. The company will also provide project management, documentation development and other services, including engineering, delivery, installation, testing and start-up, as well as a full range of training courses for the systems, covering development, commissioning and maintenance. 

“Our main priority in the refining segment is to ensure steady growth and to meet the requirements of Russia’s latest technical regulations on sulphur content in products,” said Alexander Romanov, general director, Saratov Oil Refinery. “These two projects will help us to minimise environmental impact, sustain and improve plant safety and maximise profits.”
“The hydrofining and isomerisation units are critical parts of the refinery’s development programme and the competence of vendors was a critical issue for refinery management. TNK-BP needed a complete enterprise control solution that offered not only technical excellence, but long-term business benefits,” said Boris Muratov, general manager, Invensys Operations Management, Russia. “Our eight-year experience with Saratov meant that we had a solid understanding of the company’s needs, and were able to offer a high-value, low-risk solution that will help TNK-BP achieve control, environment and safety excellence.”

Affordable environment and safety excellence

Invensys Operations Management introduced its new Triconex® General Purpose System at OpsManage 2010. The new offering provides a lower-cost entry point into the market-leading Triconex safety system product line. The Triconex line allows clients to optimise their choice of safety system for their specific requirements, enabling them to meet new safety standards, counter global competition and address cost pressures by lowering investment and lifecycle costs.

TUV-certified for Safety Integrity Level 2 (SIL 2) applications, the Triconex General Purpose System is an important new component of the company’s InFusion™ Enterprise Control System (ECS). The Triconex General Purpose System is supported by familiar engineering tools and applications and can communicate with other control systems. 

“The new Triconex system delivers high-availability in a variety of safety and critical control applications, as well as offers secure integration with other systems. By providing the highest system availability and reliability in the market today, we can help protect plant personnel, secure production assets and achieve compliance with rigorous environmental standards, thereby driving environment and safety excellence,” said Mike Chmilewski, vice president, technology innovations, Invensys Operations Management. “Our customers can utilise the Triconex General Purpose System to maximise process and plant uptime, meet or exceed safety targets and mitigate environmental impact.”

For many businesses, improving operational excellence by maximising gross margins, product quality and financial performance, while reducing operating expenses, has become a top priority. At the same time, stringent health, regulatory and environmental compliance issues are driving an even greater focus on safety. The versatility of the new Triconex General Purpose System enables businesses to fulfill requirements for critical control applications needing high availability, for example, turbomachinery control, as well as SIL 2 safety applications, such as emergency shutdown, fire and gas protection and burner management. It is also compatible with Invensys’ Triconex Tricon™ and Triconex Trident™ safety systems that already meet SIL 3 requirements. High-availability architecture means that any Triconex safety system never needs to stop, improving clients’ performance and profitability and allowing them to generate more revenue.

The new Triconex system comes with rich safety and critical control application libraries, proven in some of the world’s most demanding applications, and its powerful functionality is proven to reduce engineering and maintenance costs, providing optimum safety and maximising plant uptime. It also integrates with all well-known process control systems using industry standard protocols, and for added protection, is Achilles-certified, protecting it from cyber attack.

New contract with Chinese nuclear power

Triconex and Foxboro I/A Series systems to help achieve safety and control excellence as China boosts power generation capacity

Invensys Operations Management has signed a second long-term agreement with China Nuclear Power Engineering Co. (CNPE) to provide safety and distributed control systems and solutions for two 650MW pressurised water reactor units under construction on Hainan Island on the southern tip of China.

Ulf Henriksson, chief executive officer, Invensys plc, commented, "We look forward to continuing our work with CNPE. This contract renews and strengthens our commitment to helping grow and develop reliable and efficient nuclear power capability for China in the safest way possible."

Under the terms of the contract, Invensys will provide its Triconex® critical control and Foxboro® I/A Series(r) distributed control systems (DCS), helping the Changjiang Nuclear Power Plant achieve safety and control excellence.

"We are pleased to continue our long-term strategic partnership with CNPE, further helping them to increase China's capacity for power generation," said Sudipta Bhattacharya, president and chief executive officer, Invensys Operations Management. "Our systems will serve as a digital platform to drive safety and control excellence in these units."

By providing a diverse, scalable distributed control and safety solution, including advanced digital control room design, safety display units, priority logic modules and defense-in-depth systems built on the Triconex and I/A Series systems, Invensys addressed CNPE's safety and availability requirements.

"We expect a successful DCS project with the close cooperation of CNPE and Invensys," a spokesman for the Hainan Nuclear Power Company said, adding that with work continuing at Units 1 and 2 of the Fuqing and Fangjiashan nuclear power plants in Fujian and Zhejiang, "the contract for the Changjiang Nuclear Power Plant in Hainan represents a further significant step towards long-term cooperation between CNPE and Invensys."

This is the second contract awarded to Invensys by CNPE, following an agreement the companies reached in 2008 for the development and implementation of four large-scale safety and non-safety distributed control systems, including fully digitised main control rooms, equipped with Invensys safety and control system technology, for two new nuclear power plants under construction in the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces.

System response time and analytics for rotating equipment

Invensys Operations Management has announced the availability of version 2.1.1 of its Triconex® Trident™ safety system. The new version has two new input modules that enhance worker safety, reduce downtime and deliver more accurate trip analysis in power and turbomachinery applications, helping customers to achieve safety excellence. One new module enables faster response to unsafe equipment conditions; another optimises trip data analysis to prevent future upsets.

"Protecting rotating equipment from damage is critical to our customers' operations, and the ability to provide highly accurate plant information helps determine the root cause of trips more effectively, as well as achieve safety excellence," said Alejandro Fung, director of safety systems product management, Invensys Operations Management. "Enhancements to the latest Trident system bring another level of safety to production assets. High reliability, high availability, predictive over-speed condition and high-resolution sequence of event information helps customers achieve better uptime and a better understanding of the critical indicators that lead to process shutdowns."

The faster response time of the new Trident system offering is the result of an enhanced pulse input module, which measures speed, rate-of-speed change and the rate of acceleration of rotating equipment in milliseconds. This enables faster prediction of over-speed conditions, which can jeopardise personnel, interrupt operations and damage equipment.

The optimised trip analysis is the result of a new high-resolution digital input module, which monitors changes of state and sequence of events (SOE) and provides a timestamp resolution of one millisecond with an accuracy of one millisecond. Process trips generate valuable information about the conditions that caused the shutdown. Reviewing and analysing such data can be challenging and time consuming, however, and having SOE data with a one millisecond resolution can be a significant aid in determining the root cause of the shutdown.

By safely maintaining maximum process uptime, Triconex safety systems can help meet and exceed production targets. The scalable Triconex Trident safety system is based on industry-proven triple modular redundant (TMR) technology that helps customers protect plant personnel and production assets, as well as achieve compliance with rigorous environmental standards by providing the highest system availability and reliability in the market today.

Industrial cyber security advances!

-Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall addresses historical security challenges, improves interoperability of critical safety systems-

Invensys Operations Management has teamed with Byres Security Inc. and MTL Instruments to deliver a ground-breaking cyber security solution. The new Triconex® / TofinoTM OPC firewall will harden industrial safety systems against network accidents and attacks. It is the first firewall that protects integrated applications based on OPC Classic, the world's most widely used industrial integration protocol.

To enable greater interoperability of its Triconex safety systems, Invensys pioneered embedding OPC servers within its Tricon™ communications module (TCM). To ensure that these modules were cyber secure, Invensys teamed with Byres Security, which had recently introduced the world's first content inspection firewall for the MODBUS TCP protocol as part of Byres Security's Tofino product line, in order to create a firewall specifically for Triconex systems. The two companies then enlisted the services of MTL Instruments to build the security hardware. The result is the Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall, which is now available for Invensys customers using the Triconex TCM with the embedded OPC solution.

"Processors and manufacturers are continuously threatened by new and increasingly dangerous cyber attacks, which requires greater vigilance and security," said Joe Scalia, portfolio architect, Invensys Operations Management. "The Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall mitigates those risks by managing the traffic to and from the Triconex TCM, providing further assurance that a cyber incursion will not compromise integrated communications between the safety and critical control systems and supervisory HMI or distributed control systems. By tapping into the Invensys Operations Management ecosystem of partners and collaborating with the renowned experts from Byres Security and MTL, we co-innovated to resolve a crucial client challenge and help them achieve safety excellence."

The Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall provides security features developed specifically for Triconex and its embedded OPC Classic server to protect against malicious attacks and other threats to network operations. Users deploy the new firewall in front of the Triconex OPC server, thwarting attacks and traffic storms before they reach the safety and critical control system. It automatically mitigates risks related to previously published DCOM vulnerabilities, while providing packet management and rate limiting to prevent network traffic problems that could have an adverse effect on the stability of the safety system.

For many companies, good network reliability, like that provided by the Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall, is just as important as good security, and with its unique features and capabilities, the Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall can help avoid multi-million dollar accidents and untold environmental damage.

"Past plant shutdowns, for example, haven't been caused by hackers. Instead they were the result of badly configured software causing traffic storms that impacted critical controllers and other systems," said Eric Byres (pic right), security expert and technical officer at Byres Security. "The Triconex / Tofino OPC firewall does much more than block hackers and viruses from accessing the safety system. Its dynamic port management and built-in traffic-rate controls prevent many basic network problems from spreading throughout a plant."

"The next generation of the OPC Foundation interoperability specifications, the OPC Unified Architecture, incorporates similar cyber security protection, based on the excellent work of founding companies like Byres Security, MTL Instruments and Invensys," said Thomas J. Burke, president, OPC Foundation. "Launching the unique Invensys solution is the important milestone in demonstrating that users can secure the interoperability of OPC Classic within other applications without worrying about cyber security. As the use of OPC Unified Architecture expands, we look forward to collaborating with these market leaders to develop additional innovative, readily deployable solutions for the benefit of the entire OPC user community."

"We were pleased to join Invensys in developing a firewall for their industry-leading Triconex safety solutions," Byres said. "Together with MTL, we have delivered a solution that will improve plant safety and security, as well as enable manufacturers to deploy OPC to achieve new levels of interoperability for all of their operations, enabling, for example, tighter integration of safety and asset management systems to share data and help prevent trips."

See also Security beyond Plant Walls (29/7/2009)

New website for Invensys

Invensys Operations Management has launched its new corporate website. The new site shows how the company's premier industry brands and solutions offer the most holistic, cost-effective way to optimise and improve the performance and profitability of its clients' business operations.

"Over the past several months, we have made significant investments to create a customer- and visitor-friendly site that supports our open, collaborative approach," said Mark Davidson, vice president, global marketing, Invensys Operations Management. "As a truly integrated company, the combined capabilities of our eight leading brands, including Avantis®, Eurotherm®, Foxboro®, IMServ™, InFusion™, SimSci-Esscor™, Triconex® and Wonderware® are aligned for our clients' long-term success, and the new website has been designed for easy access to information about our unique industry solutions, services and products offerings.
"With more enhancements to come, this is only Phase 1 of our new online presence, but we are pleased to offer a look at the value Invensys Operations Management provides to our clients and the market in general. With an open environment and platform, we help improve the performance of our clients' resources-their people, equipment, energy and materials-in real time, with dramatic, measurable results. Our new site demonstrates that when working with Invensys, the experience will be one of real collaboration with real-time results."

Located at iom.invensys.com, the website features an integrated view of Invensys Operations Management, with sections devoted to specific industries, solutions, products, and consulting and service offerings, along with customer and ecosystem partner support and training. The site is also home to 60 new customer success stories, as well as additional information.