Glossary

Here are some terms specific to this application in addition to general good-to-know terms.

Control Room Terms

SCADA: Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. An architecture for managing control systems.

Devices

• PLC: Programmable Logic Controller. A device that not only reports data and controls outputs, but also can make decisions on its own.
• RTU: Remote Terminal Unit. Provides monitoring to and basic output from a SCADA system, interfacing with various types of devices/controls.

Abbreviations

• ACK: Alarm ACKnowledge. This indicates you (the Operator) understand an alarm occured and would like to stop the audio tone(s).
• PPM: Protected Peripheral Manager. This is an abstraction layer created specifically for this project that prevents peripheral calls from crashing applications.
• RCP: Reactor Coolant Pump. This is one of those things that is for real-world terminology with water-cooled reactors, here it just relates to the reactor coolant flow.
• RCS: Reactor Coolant System. This encompasses the whole cooling loop (reactor coolant levels, boilers, and turbines).
• RPS: Reactor Protection System. This is the primary purpose of the Reactor PLC that monitors and protects the reactor from dangerous scenarios.

Terminology

• Fault: Something has gone wrong.
• Nominal: Normal operation. Everything operating as intended.
• Ringback: An indication that an alarm had gone off so that you (the Operator) is aware, even if the alarm condition is no longer met.
• Transient: A change in state from normal operation. Coolant levels dropping or core temperature rising above nominal values would be examples of transients.
• Tripped: An alarm condition has been met and is still met.
• Tripping: An alarm condition is met but has not met the minimum time before a condition is deemed a problem.
• Turbine Trip: The turbine stops, which prevents heated coolant from being properly cooled. In Mekanism, this would occur when a turbine cannot generate any more energy due to filling its buffer and having no output with any storage for energy left.

You may want to review this Wikipedia page for details on alarm terminology.

Software Terms

Control System

• br100: This is the burn rate converted by math.floor(burn_rate * 100.0) to get it as an integer. This makes math/checks easier.