U.S. Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant uses RFID to track 40,000 spare equipment
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College students from PolyGAIT, an RFID experimental group at California Institute of Technology, designed and installed an RFID system for the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, helping the plant manager to clearly understand the precise location of the plant’s backup equipment (used to repair the two reactors), even if the equipment is not in use. It has been 5 years or more.
The experimental team was led by Tali Freed and Larry Rinzel, professors of industrial and manufacturing engineering at the university, and installed the system in the nuclear power plant warehouse about a year ago. The graduate student Mike Krist was the head of this project and was an intern at DCPP at the time. Krist developed system software to integrate the RFID system with the factory’s existing back-end system. Since then, Del Ritchie, director of supply chain at DCPP, said the power plant has improved accuracy, reducing the inventory count time of the entire warehouse from 2,000 man-hours to 300, and reducing the time required for workers to search for missing items from a few days. To a few minutes. Due to the success of this system, the power plant tool management team also plans to install an RFID system in the second half of this year to track tools entering and leaving the tool room.
The equipment and its shelf are all pasted with EPC Gen 2 passive UHF RFID tags
The US state-owned power supply company PG&E, which operates the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, first paid attention to the RFID technology of the PolyGAIT laboratory in 2008. PG&E has maintained a close cooperative relationship with California Institute of Technology.
PG&E finally decided to use RFID technology in the DCPP warehouse to track some of the backup equipment of the two nuclear reactors. The power plant has 70,000 pieces of backup equipment. Approximately 40,000 of these assets are “just in case” equipment-that is, it is unlikely to be used, but must be in stock. The vast majority of these “just in case” equipment is highly specialized. If a piece of equipment in the reactor fails to work normally, it cannot be replaced immediately. The entire reactor will have to be shut down until suitable replacement equipment is found.
Using RFID, Ritchie hopes to enhance the real-time visibility of the warehouse, that is, to understand the specific inventory equipment and its location at any time. The nuclear power plant has a 100,000-square-foot warehouse with an inventory value of more than $1 million. Every piece of equipment inside must be inspected every two years. “We think the best application is to label immovable items,” Ritchie explained. These 40,000 equipment inventory and testing (to ensure that they are in normal working conditions) consume a lot of staff time. “We don’t want the opportunity to use them, but they are invaluable if needed,” Ritchie said.
The label attached to the metal device adds foam to the back to increase the reading distance
The vast majority of inventory inventory takes place during the refueling maintenance period (Nuclear power plant refueling maintenance is a series of planned and targeted maintenance during nuclear power plant replacement. The quality of refueling maintenance directly affects nuclear power plants. Safe, reliable and economical operation of the next fuel cycle of the plant). Each reactor is refueled every 18th. When the reactor is shut down for refueling, all its parts are inspected and repaired to ensure that they are working properly, and new parts are taken from the warehouse to replace worn parts according to actual conditions. Usually, about 10,000 parts are taken out of the warehouse every time the material is changed.
In the summer of 2008, PG&E began labeling 20,000 pieces of equipment that are not expected to be used within 5 years, each worth more than US$1 million. The challenge for nuclear power plants is to find the best way to read tags without interference and without the need to build a large reader-writer infrastructure.
The PolyGAIT solution uses a reader with two antennas, one installed on each forklift (three in total), and a handheld reader is used to read the ID code of the device stored in the drawer. The label reading and the data of the device attached to it are stored in the software provided by Cal Poly.
The label contains the EPC Gen 2 passive UHF RSI-647 Corkscrew RFID inlay supplied by RSI ID Technologies, which is affixed to the device. The information of each piece of equipment is input into DCPP’s SAP ERP system and RFID software, and a label is printed on a Zebra Technology printer. The ID code of the label corresponds to the attached asset. After that, a forklift will transport the labels to the storage location. There, the forklift’s Sirit INfinity510 RFID reader reads the shelf and equipment tags, and the software matches the shelf RFID tags with the equipment tags. The antenna on the forklift, Freed said, can read the ID codes of the high and low shelves. The information is forwarded by the Sirit reader to the back-end software via Wi-Fi connection.
In addition, each time the forklift passes through an aisle, the RFID reader reads the RFID tags of the aisle shelves and the tags of the stored equipment, and sends the data to the software again, thereby providing DCPP with real-time inventory of assets. For small devices stored in metal drawers (may obstruct UHF RFID signals). The employee must remove an antenna from the forklift, open the drawer, read the tag, and again use the Wi-Fi interface to send information to the back-end system. The movable antenna is mounted on the handle of the handset, Freed said.
Install several antennas on the forklift to read shelves of different heights
The software obtains and compiles the data, and then provides the reading location and time of each piece of equipment to the DCPP management software of the company’s ERP system. When searching for specific equipment, workers use DCPP management software to search and obtain location data from RFID software. This saves time for workers to find specific equipment.
If the forklift reads that the ID code of the shelf does not match the ID code of the device, the system will send an alarm to the software. In order to test the positioning function of the system, Ritchie said that he placed three pieces of equipment in the warehouse, and the ID code of the equipment was entered into the forklift’s reader. The reader beeps every time the forklift is approaching the equipment sought. The search process takes only three minutes to find, Ritchie said, it used to take three days.
Within one year of system application, inventory tracking time (including parts retrieval during refueling) was reduced from 2000 hours to 300. Due to labor cost savings, Ritchie said the company expects to recover the RFID hardware and software costs within 18 months.
Due to the successful implementation of the warehouse system, DCPP is currently also implementing a set of RFID solutions in its tool room. The tool tracking system designed and developed by PolyGAIT is expected to run in 2010 or early 2011. According to John Gutierrez, head of the nuclear plant tool management group, it will be used to track the entry and exit of tools and their hands.
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