Triconex earns controls contract from Nebraska Public Power District

Triconex, a unit of Invensys Process Systems, has won a contract from Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) to retrofit and upgrade critical controls at NPPD’s Sheldon Station, a coal-fired generating plant. The company will provide the mechanical retrofit and controls upgrade for a Westinghouse reheat turbine generator.

By Control Engineering Staff March 17, 2005

Triconex , a unit of Invensys Process Systems, has won a contract from Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) to retrofit and upgrade critical controls at NPPD’s Sheldon Station, a coal-fired generating plant. The company will provide the mechanical retrofit and controls upgrade for a Westinghouse reheat turbine generator. The power station will replace the existing mechanical governor system with Triconex’s TS-3000 Triple Modular Redundant (TMR) control system. Start-up of the controller is scheduled for June 2005.

Bill Barkovitz, Triconex’ vice president of product marketing, anticipates the power sector will continue to be a growth area for the company “as critical infrastructure reliability improvements take center stage in the power generation industry.” Triconex supplies products, systems, and services for safety, critical control, and turbomachinery applications.

TMR technology uses three fault-tolerant, isolated, parallel main processors and a two-out-of-three voting scheme to ensure error-free process operation. The architecture eliminates any single point of failure and enables on-line maintenance, on-line programming downloads, self-calibration, and fault localization.

Located near Hallam, NE, Sheldon Station was originally built as an experimental nuclear power plant for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The nuclear portion of the facility has been decommissioned. Today, the station’s two boilers can generate 225,000 kW of electricity.

—Jeanine Katzel, senior editor, Control Engineering, jkatzel@reedbusiness.com