Knowledge based system for control rod programming of BWRs.

Abstract

A knowledge based system has been developed to support designers in control rod programming of BWRs. The programming searches through optimal control rod patterns to realize safe and effective burning of nuclear fuel. Knowledge of experienced designers plays the main role in minimizing the number of calculations by the core performance evaluation code. This code predicts power distribution and thermal margins of the nuclear fuel.This knowledge is transformed into 'if-then' type rules and subroutines, and is stored in a knowledge base of the knowledge based system. The system consists of working area, an inference engine and the knowledge base. The inference engine can detect those data which have to be regenerated, call those subroutine which control the user's interface and numerical computations, and store competitive sets of data in different parts of the working area.Using this system, control rod programming of a BWR plant was traced with about 500 rules and 150 subroutines. Both the generation of control rod patterns for the first calculation of the code and the modification of a control rod pattern to reflect the calculation were completed more effectively than in a conventional method.

Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management for Light Water Reactors

“…This work relies heavily on heuristic rules to direct the optimization rather than the use formal mathematical optimization rnethods. [67][68][69][70] Recently, the capability to optimize BWR LPs, given an inventory of available bundle designs and the CRP, using a high fidelity core simulator and SA has been demonstrated by the FORMOSA-B code 71 . Figure 11 to Figure 19 and Table 3 present some results from employing FORMOSA-B to optimize an LP with the objective of maximizing the EOC reactivity.…”