A Course Development Project for Hardware Diversity and Software Reliability Education for Digital Instrumentation and Control of Nuclear Power Plant

This paper discusses a current courseware development project to address the lack of minority students and engineers in the challenging area of safetycritical application in digital control technology for nuclear power plant (NPP). The project aims to develop a new course of nuclear power and to teach it to all engineering students at Howard University, which do not have a nuclear engineering department, the concepts of hardware/software diversity against common mode failures and the realistic practice of those concepts in the rector scram control of nuclear power plant operation. A unique teaching model is applied in offering the course that will be developed by the project. The model seeks to teach the new course by combining guest experts who will teach general nuclear engineering concepts and theories and the project investigators who will teach the specific area of software/hardware reliability in digital instrumentation and control. The unique location of Howard University which has been successful in inviting external experts to the classrooms makes this new model of teaching possible. The present focus of the project has two components: one is to form a nuclear power expert network from which guest speakers are selected and the other is to develop a training kit for hardware/software diversity against common mode failures in digital system. This paper summarizes the course development project and the current status of the training kit development.