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TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND

AUTOMATION FOR OPERATING

NUCLEAR PLANTS

Engineering Assistance to Periodic Safety Review of Operating Nuclear Plants,
Plantlife extension studies, is a growing business area in India and Globally as
more plants are approaching their design life. This involves Deterministic and
Probabilistic safety assessment of operating nuclear assets. TCE is currently the only
Indian consultant assisting in this area for commercial-scale nuclear plants.

TCE has successfully developed the Deterministic Safety Assessment (as a new
service offering) and is engaged with clients including NPCIL-PHWR, NPCIL-LWR
and IGCAR.

Deterministic safety assessment (as per Conservative Deterministic Failure Margin
(CDFM) method) of any structure/component involves the following stages

Performing Finite Element (FE) Analysis of the structure/component

Digitising the As-built strength of various structures and components.

Finding the margin available to assess the as-is condition of the components.
(High Confidence of Low Probability of Failure (HCLPF) factor)

This involves handling massive volumes of as-built data and FE analysis results.

Anticipating the need for an automation-tool to optimise the process, an
integrated one-click program, "SMART", which integrates a suite of modules, has
been developed which extracts and links FE Analysis results (Demand), with as-
built digital data of the plant (Capacity) to assess the Seismic Margin available, for
various structural elements.

The advantage of having this technology and set of tools developed has helped
TCE retain its position as a monopoly supplier in this area and working on repeat
orders from DAE.

Since the automation is entirely modular based on standard work-flows, it is
effortless to extend it for any other international design codes or accommodate
any technological advances. TCE is currently expanding the tool for Russian SNiP
codes for an ongoing Light Water Reactor project.

The tool's efficiency was a significant challenge as the run-time had to
be optimised for enormous data volume involving millions of numerical
calculations. TCE mitigated this by adopting careful programming methods,
including a modified numerical search method where the computational speed
has been improved, apart from automating the process.

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