Selection of fuel channels for Thermal Power Measurement in 700 MWe Indian PHWR by evolutionary algorithm

This paper presents studies on the design of Thermal Power Monitoring System (TPMS) for the forthcoming 700 MWe Indian Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR). This reactor contains total 392 horizontal fuel channels. Each channel contains clustered natural Uranium fuel along with associated heavy water coolant placed inside a pressure tube. The coolant in different fuel channels is physically and thermally isolated from each other inside the core. It is necessary to select 44 fuel channels (out of 392) for keeping instrumentation to measure flow and temperature of coolant. The reactor is logically divided into 7 radial zones each containing certain number of fuel channels. The selection of instrumented channels is to be made such that power measured by them in terms of per unit basis represents the true zone-wise and global powers fairly accurately. This should be possible for a large number of reactor configurations that can occur because of the movement of reactivity devices in the core. Such a study is useful to make the TPMS more accurate means to measure the reactor bulk power and zone powers. The choice of 44 channels is an optimization problem in which the error in zonal and global power prediction is to be minimized. There are several constraints on the selection of instrumented channels. Therefore, a constrained combinatorial optimization problem has to be solved. An evolutionary technique based on Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) is used for this purpose. A suitable pattern of 44 instrumented channels is obtained for which errors in zonal and global powers are less than 0.5% and 2.0% respectively. The equilibrium state of the core with 357 possible device configurations is considered for the optimization.