With a frigid Armageddon falling over the Midwest and Northeast parts of the U.S. this week, the very fabric of society seems to be frozen itself. Mail has been suspended in Michigan, people are freezing to death for cigarettes, beer is turning to yellow blocks in trucks before they reach the stores, businesses have shuttered their doors, schools have closed eliciting a joyous cry from children everywhere, and Chicago became colder than Antarctica as winter slipped its frozen hands into every avenue of America.
One such place frigid temperatures reached was the PSEG Salem 2 reactor New Jersey. While no danger to the surrounding public ever manifested, engineers were forced to shut down the reactor early Thursday morning due to the formation of frazil ice building up in the Delaware Bay adjacent to the nuclear power plant. Frazil ice forms at the bottom of a body of water due to the rapid cooling of surface water and begins to sink when this super-cooled water is dispersed throughout its entire depth where it adheres to objects in the water, such as the Salem 2’s trash rack (the power plant’s filter system for incoming water from the bay).
You can bet that every single one of Salem 1’s Sigma 1151 analog meters did not display an alarm. No analog would. While being purely an extrapolation, this has the potential to reach larger disasters such as Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
OTEK has a meter that registers a full signal input fail alarm (with runtime stamp) that alerts both computers and operators when such an error occurs. We call it the NTM-9 and it hails from our patented New Technology Series. The NTM-9 is a 100% Form, Fit, and Function replacement for the Sigma 1151 analog meter, for Class 1E safety-related and nuclear-qualified applications, as well as Mil-Specs 461, 167-1, 810F, 901C, and IEEE-344 respectively.
Worried about cybersecurity regulations? Don’t’ be. The NTM-9 carries a cybersecurity compliant classification as well as our lifetime warranty. Like all our products, this model is completely customizable to your specific applications and requires only minimal rewiring—no lengthy installation outages, expensive refurbishing of your I & C room, or extensive training for your operators. Just unwire the Sigma 1151 and wire in the NTM-9.
Additional features include an automatic tricolor bar with intensity control, self-diagnostics, isolated serial I/O with USB or RS485 options (Ethernet & Flash Memory are available on externally-powered models), math functions, over thirty isolated input signals, 4 relays or O.C.T, a configurable bar direction (up/down/center zero), and only 100mW@5VDC.
While we can’t help you with the cold, we can help you shrug off analog obsolescence. Please give us a call at (520) 748-7900 or email our sales office at sales@otekcorp.com.
We do all the work so all you have to do is Plug & Play!
