Integration of Wireless Sensor Networks and Battery-free RFID for Advanced Reactors

A typical nuclear power plant (NPP) uses about 1000 Km of cables for power, instrumentation, and control. The cost associated with cable installation and maintenance, managing the aging cables, and cable replacement is significant. Replacing wired sensors with wireless sensor networks not only reduces the cost in NPPs, it also allows to place more sensors in areas that are hard to reach and difficult to install cables. Although wireless technology has been widely used in industrial applications, it has not been deployed in NPPs due NPP’s challenging environment for radio frequency (RF) propagation. These challenges include, signal cancellations due to reflections from heavy metallic environment, signal attenuation caused by thick nuclear concrete walls, and electromagnetic interference from other radio services. Significant research has been conducted in industry, academia, and national laboratories in sensor development and transmission of sensor data wirelessly. However, to- date there has not been any low-cost end-to-end solutions that can collect sensor data and location wirelessly inside the instrumentation or containment area and send it through the thick concrete walls to control and monitoring area. A reliable wireless sensor network with location capability can improve process safety and efficiency in responding to anomalies in current power plants and future advanced reactors, as well as small modular reactors. This phase I SBIR will develop and demonstrate a low cost end-to-end wireless sensor communications system by integrating two powerful commercially available technologies - radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensor networks (WSN) combined with Machine Learning (ML). These commercial technologies are already used in industrial inventory and remote monitoring applications. A suite of sensors including temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, and strain gauge integrated with secure wireless nodes will be used to monitor the state of health of the reactors and the environmental conditions of the NPPs. The wireless system sends sensor data and location information with a decision from sensor fusion algorithm and machine learning models to outside of the reactor area for fast response by operators. This wireless sensing and locating (WISLO) system, uses low power battery operated WSNs with 2.5 years of battery life and will use passive (battery-free) RFID tags to send sensor data and location through the nuclear concrete walls. All components of this system design are commercially available at low cost. The applications and public benefits of this project can be significant for remote health monitoring such as machinery health monitoring in submarines, aircrafts, and automobiles. In addition, environmental condition monitoring applications such as home and industrial automation applications can benefit from WISLO system. The enabling technology resulting from this project will allow widespread acceptance of localized anomaly detection in factories and warehouses, as well as for high value asset state-of-health monitoring such as sensitive nuclear materials.