PD Power-Level Control Design for PWRs: A Physically-Based Approach

Pressurized water reactor (PWR) is the most widely used nuclear fission reactor, and the renaissance of fission energy industry needs the safe, stable and efficient operation of PWRs. Power-level control technique which strengthens the closed-loop stability and dynamic performance is meaningful to build a strong operation strategy for PWRs. In this paper, after extending the shifted-ectropy of thermodynamic systems to that of transport systems, a proportional-differential (PD) power-level controller is proposed for PWRs based on the physically-based approach. A sufficient condition for this PD controller to provide the globally asymptotic stability of those reactor state variables is established. Numerical simulation results not only verify the correctness of the theoretic results but also illustrate the relationship between the control performance and controller parameters. The meaning of this result is giving a theoretic explanation to why the simple PD control is effective for PWR power-level regulation practically.