Simulator contract for Flamanville EPR
15 May 2009
L-3 MAPPS is to provide Areva with an engineering simulator based on the Flamanville 3 Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) design.
The contract is part of the continuing services L-3 MAPPS provides to Areva’s Real-Time Simulation Centre in Paris and closely follows the Olkiluoto 3 EPR engineering simulator that was put into service by L-3 MAPPS at Areva’s test facility in Erlangen, Germany, in October 2008.
The Flamanville 3 engineering simulator is expected to be delivered at the end of 2010. It will be used to perform plant engineering and emergency response training, operating procedures analysis and improvement, system design modifications, and preliminary safety analysis.
Through the simulator, the instrumentation and control (I&C) and human-machine interface (HMI) for the distributed control systems (DCS) will be simulated using L-3 MAPPS technology. At a later stage, L-3 MAPPS will integrate into the simulator its Cathare thermal-hydraulic calculation engineering code for nuclear power plant safety analysis.
The Cathare software has been in development for three decades, through cooperation with engineers from the French Commission for Atomic Energy (CEA), Electricité de France (EdF), Areva and the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN).
The simulator will additionally be used to test the modelled plant responses to transients, to verify plant operating procedures, to perform validation of reference plant calculations, and to train plant commissioning personnel.
The Flamanville 3 engineering simulator configuration will operate on the same L-3 MAPPS technology and platform used by three other simulator configurations for French-designed reactors at the Areva Tower in Paris La Défense. These are for the CP2 (900 MWe, 3-loop), DPY (1300 MWe, 4-loop) and N4 (1450 MWe, 4-loop) designs.