Adaptive Proportional-Differential Power-Level Control for Pressurized Water Reactors

It is well known that the pressurized water reactor (PWR) is the most widely utilized nuclear fission reactor whose safe, stable and efficient operation is meaningful to the nowadays renaissance of nuclear energy industry. Power-level regulation is a significant technique for guaranteeing operational stability and efficiency of nuclear reactors. Since every nuclear reactor is a complex nonlinear system with high parameter uncertainties, it is necessary to develop the adaptive power-level control technique that strengthens closed-loop stability, guarantees load-following performance and is un-sensitive to the parameter uncertainties. In this paper, an adaptive proportional-differential (PD) control law is proposed for the power-level regulation of the PWR, which is proved theoretically to be globally asymptotically stabilizable and can be tuned online with an adaptation law. Moreover, numerical simulation results show not only the feasibility of this newly-built regulator but also the relationship between control performance and the parameter of the adaptation law.