Modeling and identification of a nuclear reactor with temperature effects and Xenon poisoning

This paper presents the modeling and identification procedure for a VVER-type pressurized water reactor. The modeling goal is to produce a mathematical description in nonlinear state-space form that is suitable for control-oriented model analysis and preliminary controller design experiments. The proposed model takes temperature effects and xenon poisoning into consideration and thus it is an extension of formerly published simpler model structures. Real transient measurement data from the plant has been used for the identification that is based on standard prediction error minimization. It is shown that the model is fairly well identifiable and the newly inserted model components significantly improve the quality of fit between the measured and computed model outputs. Furthermore, the estimated parameter values fall into physically meaningful ranges.