Design of control strategy for reactor power control system of LBE cooled Actinide Burner Reactor (ABR) using system analysis code NUSOL-LMR

Abstract

The power control strategy for the Lead–Bismuth Eutectic (LBE) cooled Actinide Burner Reactor (ABR) has been designed to assess the closed-loop performance of newly developed control blocks that were not modeled in the NUSOL-LMR code before this research effort. After establishing a sustainable model of ABR in NUSOL-LMR, validation of the model in light of the already-published research is performed. The said closed-loop control strategy (consisting of the power and temperature control blocks) is evaluated under different transient scenarios (reactivity insertion, primary coolant pump fault, and change in demand power levels). The power and temperature control blocks concurrently control reactor power during any transient occurrence. The coupling effect of the primary coolant temperature deviation on the reactor power has been minimized by the proportional and integral (PI) controller in the temperature control block. The simulation results demonstrate that the closed-loop performance of the ABR under the controller action during transient events is quite satisfactory. The closed-loop power regulation performance of the conventional sliding mode controller (SMC) with a PI sliding surface (PISM) in the power control block of NUSOL-LMR is better than that of a simple proportional, integral and derivative (PID) controller. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system with the PISM controller has been ensured using the Lyapunov stability theory.