FPGA-based real-time implementation of a digital reactivity-meter

The aim of this paper is to present a Hardware/Software design approach for the real-time implementation of a digital reactivity meter on a Zynq SoC platform (FPGA: Field-Programmable Gate Array). As a primary design tool, the Xilinx System Generator (XSG) programming tool has been used. The elementary hardware digital processing units, used to solve the inverse kinetics equations, have been implemented inside the Programming Logic (PL) part of the Zynq platform. Other secondary tasks, such as communication with the host PC, data storage and display have been devoted to the software application running on the Processing System (PS) part. A dedicated Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been also developed on a remote host computer. This application will be essentially used to handle the communication with the embedded reactivity measurement system and to display the reactivity evolution curves through the time. The design has been validated by comparing the obtained results with those proposed in the literature. Real plant data, acquired from Es-salam research reactor, has been also used to confirm the online efficiency of the design. Experimental results demonstrate that the system works well for both negative and positive reactivity insertions.