Digital Twins, a New Step for Long Term Operation of Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

Digitalization is one of the key technology to improve safety and performance of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP). EDF has initiated R&D in this field for more than 10 years and some tools are now commonly used by EDF operators. They cover outage management (use of virtual reality for outage preparation, 3D visualization of plant maintenance and upgrade…), human performance in operation (plant field workers mobile technologies, augmented reality to improve situation awareness, advanced training…), advanced plant control automation and digital architecture (fab lab for design and fast checking of future concept of operation…), as well as on-line equipment and process monitoring. Now the new challenges are to develop “digital twins” which are digital models fed by on-line data from operation and to benefit from data analytics science which made great progress during the last years. EDF has engaged new programs in these fields that will support long term operation of most critical nuclear equipment. A first development, dedicated to a 1:3 scale mock-up of a NPP containment is now operational. It gives an idea of the technical challenges to handle before deploying such technology for EDF fleet.