Supervisory Constraint Control of Advanced Multi-Modular Nuclear Reactor Plants

Advanced nuclear power plants, especially multi-modular designs, will benefit from the implementation of automatic reactor control. A proposed method of non-linear supervisory constraint control is applied to a liquid metal cooled reactor (LMR) module for evaluation. The supervisory element chooses operating set points and ensures that feasibility of control is maintained using a reactivity constraint. A reactor plant model, implemented on a personal computer, is used for controller evaluation. The multi-modular control problem, and proposed supervisory constraint control structure are discussed. Transient simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.