Zigbee Technology Essay

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Nuclear Reactor Automation
Nuclear reactor is a device to initiate and control a sustained nuclear chain reaction. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for generating electricity and in propulsion of ships.
Nuclear reactor automation and control is an essential part of nuclear reactor control rooms. Nuclear reactor automation and control system is defined as a system which monitors, displays and controls the activities i.e. heating process, cooling process, reactions etc. of the nuclear reactor plants which may be installed in power generation nuclear reactors. Major role of automation and control in professional nuclear reactor is to monitor all major activities of processing and reporting that monitoring

Features of ZigBee Technology
ZigBee Technology has very useful features and characteristics:
• ZigBee technology provides wireless networking to connect several devices and to control them through one button. This wireless networking avoids the threat of short circuiting. Centralization control system reduces the man power.
• As a wireless communication system, ZigBee technology helps to monitor the activities and manipulates in a better way.
• ZigBee technology used in the remote control devices helps to control the function at a specific range. This feature of ZigBee Technology is very attractive and effortless. In industry all the units are centralized in one place with the help of remote control or switch-based system.
• ZigBee technology based devices are designed on low-power frequency therefore are reliable. Low-power consumption feature of ZigBee technology helps to run a device for a long duration or sometimes this duration is of years.

1.3 PIC

The PIC and 8051 microcontroller are the most widely used. The 8051 is the most popular 8-bit microcontroller. The 8051 has many different I/O features. The main feature of 8051 microcontroller is the need of very little support of extra hardware to do most of the jobs. The 8051 has disadvantage that it does not have an internal analog to digital converter (ADC). PIC16F877A is an 8-bit microcontroller which has 40 pin DIP and is based on Harvard Architecture. PIC stands for Peripheral Interface Controller and F for flash memory. The PIC16F877A has internal 8 channels of 10-bit analog to digital Converter (ADC), 256 bytes of EEPROM data memory, self-programming, an LCD, 2 comparators, 2 capture/compare/PWM functions, the synchronous serial port can be configured as either 3-wire Serial Peripheral Interface for the 2-wire Inter-Integrated Circuit bus and a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter. All of these features make it ideal for more advanced level A/D applications in automotive, industrial, appliances and consumer