MLP compensated pd power-level control for modulator high temperature gas-cooled reactors

Small modular reactors (SMRs) could be beneficial in providing electricity power safely and also be viable for specific applications such as seawater desalination and heat production. Due to its inherent safety feature, the modular high temperature gas-cooled reactor (MHTGR) has been seen as one of the best candidates in building the SMR-based nuclear power plants. Since the MHTGR dynamics has high nonlinearity and parameter uncertainty, it is necessary to develop nonlinear adaptive power-level control law which is not only beneficial to the safe, stable, efficient and autonomous operation of the MHTGR but also easy to be implemented practically. In this paper, based on the physically-based control design approach and multi-layer perception (MLP), an MLP-compensated proportional-differential (PD) power-level control is proposed for the MHTGR. It is proved theoretically that this newly-built controller can guarantee bounded closed-loop stability. Numerical simulation results not only verify the theoretical results but also illustrates the high performance of this controller in suppressing the oscillation of process variables caused by system parameter uncertainty.