Power-Level Control of Nuclear Reactors Based on Feedback Dissipation and Backstepping

Abstract

Due to the existing serious climate and environment problems caused by burning fossil fuels, nuclear energy is now under rapid development. As a crucial technology in the field of nuclear energy, power-level control for nuclear power plants is significant for not only regular operating but also safety issues. A nonlinear controller based on feedback dissipation and backstepping (FDBC) is presented in this paper. This new controller can guarantee not only globally closed-loop asymptotic stability but also robustness to the uncertainties of the control rod dynamics. Numerical simulation results show the high performance of this controller. Moreover, this newly built controller is simplified to a proportional power-level controller under the assumption of no modeling error in control rod dynamics. The characteristics of these two power-level controllers are given by theoretic analysis and numerical simulation.

Dynamic Modeling and Control Characteristics of the Two-Modular HTR-PM Nuclear Plant

“…There have been many process control system design approaches such as the relative gain analysis-(RGA-) based method. In this paper, both the feedback loops and control laws of HTR-PM control system are designed by the use of the physicsbased NSSS control method proposed in [30][31][32][33][34][35][36] and module coordination control method proposed in [28,29], which provide the globally asymptotic closed-loop stability through guaranteeing the convergence of Lyapunov functions determined by the shifted-ectropies of neutron kinetics and thermodynamics as well as the kinetic energy stored in secondary-loop FFN.…”

“…To improve both the steady and transient performance, it is necessary to give proper control laws for the NSSS module composed of the MHTGR and OTSG by considering the nonlinear dynamics. The physics-based control (PBC) method is an effective way to design nonlinear reactor control laws by retaining or strengthening stable subdynamics and by cancelling or suppressing unstable subdynamics, which has been applied to the load-following control design for the PWR [30,31], MHTGR [32][33][34], and OTSG [35]. Very recently, based upon the PBC method, a novel model-free MHTGR-based NSSS module control strategy was proposed in [36], which provides globally asymptotic stability (GAS) for the NSSS module if the feedwater temperature is constant and both the helium and feedwater flowrate are well regulated.…”

“…The module control laws include the feedback regulation algorithms of the nuclear power, primary helium flowrate, feedwater flowrate, MHTGR outlet helium temperature, and OTSG outlet steam temperature, which are designed based on the physics-based NSSS control method proposed in [30][31][32][33][34][35][36].…”

Review on Application of Control Algorithms to Power Regulations of Reactor Cores

“…The feedback dissipation and backstepping, or the physicallybased control approach was applied by Dong et al [43][44][45] to study core power nonlinear control systems for a modular high temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor or PWR core. Dasgupta et al [46] accomplished stability analysis of a networked discrete PID control system of a large pressurized heavy water reactor with incomplete data and varying delay developing a switching system solution.…”

“…Improving power regulation technology of cores by the introduction of control algorithms is an important measure for safety and availability of NPPs. Over the decades, many control algorithms have been exploited and applied by researchers to core power regulations, which are the stateor output-feedback control with a state observer [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], the optimal control [18,19], the neural network or fuzzy intelligent control [20][21][22][23][24][25], the model predictive control [26][27][28], the H ∞ robust control [29][30][31], the sliding model control [32][33][34][35], the fractional order control [36][37][38][39][40][41] and other control algorithms [42][43][44][45][46][47]…”