Approximate Noninteractive Power Regulation of a Coupled-Core Nuclear Reactor

The present paper describes an application of an approximate decoupling control to the noninteractive power regulation of each core in a coupled-core nuclear reactor model. A method for designing an approximate decoupling controller is presented here. This controller consists of an output feedback compensator and a precompensator which is introduced to diagonalize an open-loop frequency response matrix approximately in the frequency range important to reactor dynamics. A " multipoint diagonalization method " is adopted for the design of the precompensator. This method possesses some superiorities compared with the pseudo-diagonalization method. Digital simulations and graphical studies by the Gershgorin band demonstrate the usefulness of the multipoint diagonalization method as well as the effectiveness of the controller for power regulation.