zthurman / reactorsim

EPICS Reactor Simulator SoftIOC

reactorsim

The intent of this script is to be run every 5-10 seconds with a systemd service and associated timer unit on a linux based EPICS SoftIOC. The simulation covers some of the signals associated with providing a reactor trip for a four loop pressurized water reactor.

For those who like reading lots of pdfs about the arcane practice of building a PWR and implementing reactor trip and ESFAS features, the source information is available on the NRCs site here.

I should probably make another repo with all of the documents on github for posterity when they notice or Westinghouse begins to care that those files are outward facing.

Doing Things

• Spin up a linux image, it can be physical, virtual, container, whatever (tested on Arch running in VMware, pretty sure it'll work on Debian too.)

• Install EPICS on it

  • You'll need gcc, perl, git, python3, and systemd to make the shenanigans work

• Once you can launch softIoc life is perdy good from the EPICS side

• Install reactorsim.service and reactorsim.timer to /etc/systemd/system, have to enable the timer (but not the service) with:

    systemctl enable --now reactorsim.timer
  

• Make another VM (tested on Debian rinning in VMware)

• Install Phoebus on it

  • If you aren't a maven wizard (I'm not), you'll want to do the JAVA_HOME config in /etc/profile. Or else maven will be grumpy with you and you will spend two bewildered days wondering where maven needs JAVA_HOME even though you can call

      $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -version
    

    and

      $JAVA_HOME/bin/javadoc --version
    

    from the command line just fine.

  • If you don't care about my ramblings, /etc/profile should have:

      export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64
    
      export PATH=\${JAVA_HOME}:\${PATH}
    

    at the end of it. I'm sure newer java's work fine but I ended up down a pretty deep rabbit hole trying to figure out what was going on here. NOTE: '/usr/lib/jvm/default' did not seem to work. I have no idea why.

• Pull 'main.bob' down and open it with Phoebus.

• Make sure your two VMs/containers/machines can hit each other over the network

From there you should be able to fiddle with the HMI. For reactor startup:

caput turbine:trip 1