HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING APPLIED TO CONTROL CENTRE DESIGN OF A RESEARCH NUCLEAR REACTOR

The Human Factors Engineering (HFE) program is an essential aspect for the design of nuclear installations. The overall aim of the HFE program is the improvement of the operational reliability and safety of plant operation. The HFE program main purpose is to ensure that human factor practices are incorporated into the plant design, emphasizing man-machine interface issues and design improvement of the nuclear reactor Control Centre. The Control Centre of nuclear reactor is a combination of control rooms, control suites and local control stations, which are functionally connected and located on the reactor site. The objective of this paper is to present a design approach for the Control Centre of a nuclear reactor used to produce radioisotopes and for nuclear research, including human factor issues. The design approach is based on participatory design principles, using human factor standards, ergonomic guidelines, and the participation of a multidisciplinary team during all design phases. Using the information gathered, an initial sketch 3D of the Control Centre was developed

Virtual simulation of a nuclear power plant's control room as a tool for ergonomic evaluation

a b s t r a c t This research deals with the virtual modeling and ergonomic evaluation of a PWR NPP control room, aiming specially with the assessing of the elapsed times spent by operators to control such safe-critical system. Secure Nuclear power plant (NPP) operation involves using guidelines that specify procedures to be followed by personnel. Control rooms' environments, though, present complex features and a series of mechanisms unpredicted by the guidelines, which must be faced accordingly. All these must be considered in ergonomics evaluations of NPP control rooms. This work proposes the use of virtual simulation through reusing a game engine platform, in which the real environment may be virtually modeled and people are able to virtually navigate and interact among themselves, to support ergonomics evaluation in adequating control rooms for licensing of NPPs. Virtual experiments results were very similar to previous ones collected in the real control NPP room, indicating that the former may be executed before the later as a means of prototyping design and evaluation, before executing any real intervention