May-June 2019 NPJ

Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2019 NuclearPlantJournal.com 27 Ryan O’Hagan Ryan O’Hagan is the Marketing Manager at AMS and has served in various technical, business, and management roles in his 10 years of service with the company. Prior to his managerial role, Mr. O’Hagan worked as a technical services ngineer making site isits or providing field testing services o nuclear power lants in the U.S. and overseas. He has xperience in several ndustries including high technology nstrumentation and data acquisition technologies, manufacturing, enterprise software, and nuclear power. He has a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville. Almost all work of AMS in China was marketed by Mr. O’Hagan who has traveled to China on a number of occasions to meet with nuclear utilities, regulators, nuclear plant design organizations, and potential AMS partners. He also participated in the AMS testing of I&C sensors at the Haiyang and Sanmen sites. the delay between the two outputs is measured as the response time of the transmitter under test (Figure 2). AMS provides ramp testing services to utilities or supplies a set of equipment referred to as “SG1M” together with training to enable the nuclear industry to perform the tests in-house. After a plant begins operating, response time testing of pressure, level, and flow transmitters are to be performed once every operating cycle using the in- situ noise analysis technique. AMS has not performed noise analysis testing at the AP1000 reactors in China except for testing a number of tank level sensors. The tank level sensors inAP1000 reactors cannot be tested for response time using the ramp method. Therefore, AMS developed and validated a new method for response time testing of tank level sensors that involves the noise analysis technique.More specifically, randomlevel fluctuations are generated in the sensor while its output is recorded and analyzed in time and/or frequency domains to obtain the sensor response time. Figure 3 shows a block diagram of the equipment sequence for testing the response time of these sensors using the noise analysis procedure. 4. Cable Testing Testing of ca- bles at the AP1000 reactors in China were performed us- ing the AMS cable cha r a c t e r i z a t i on (CHAR) system shown in Figure 4. Also shown in Figure 4 is a Time Domain Reflec- tometry (TDR) plot from testing of an AP1000 cable in China. This is just one example of re- sults of a comprehensive set of electrical measurements that AMS performed using e v t p e i i Figure 2 Ramp Test Equipment and Response Time Test Data for a Transmitter tested at an AP1000 Plant in China. the CHAR system. The work included In- sulation Resistance (IR) tests, Inductance (L) - Capacitance (C) – Resistance (R) measurements or LCR tests, Frequency Domain Reflectometry (FDR), and TDR measurements on all cables leading to safety-related RTDs and pressure trans- mitters. 5. Conclusions The AMS testing of sensors and cables in China began by LCSR measurements on RTDs at cold shutdown. The LCSR tests at cold shutdown do not (Continued on page 28)