Discrete-time integral terminal sliding mode load following controller coupled with disturbance observer for a modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor

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With the appearance of digital computers and microprocessor technologies, the control systems used in nuclear reactors continue to transform from analog devices to digital ones in recent years. A heavy challenge is that applying the pre-existing intelligent load following control algorithms developed in the continuous-time domain to the current digital devices of the nuclear reactors may yield the so-called digital chattering effects, and even trigger system instability. To this end, this paper presents a discrete-time integral terminal sliding mode controller (DTITSMC) coupled with a discrete-time disturbance observer (DTDO) for the load following of a modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (MHTGR). The common continuous-time MHTGR model is first transformed into a discrete-time form with consideration of model uncertainties, exogenous disturbances, and discretization errors. Then, on the basis of this discrete-time MHTGR model, a DTDO that can estimate the lumped disturbances, composed of model uncertainties, exogenous disturbances, discretization errors, and unmeasured system states, is developed, subsequently being combined with the designed DTITSMC scheme in order to enhance the system robustness. The proposed DTITSMC scheme coupled with the DTDO is novel in that it can be directly implemented on the digital control system of the MHTGR, while at the same time providing an improved load following control performance, owing to the integration of the state-of-the-art sliding mode control techniques, backstepping control techniques, and the disturbance feedforward compensation supported by the disturbance observer techniques. Both the estimation error convergence of the DTDO and the overall system stability are theoretically proved by the Lyapunov stability theory in this paper. Finally, the feasibility and superiority of the proposed DTITSMC scheme coupled with the DTDO over the previous discrete-time linear sliding mode controller (DTLSMC) and discrete-time proportional–integral–derivative controller (DTPIDC) are further confirmed by simulation studies, where in the absence of lumped disturbances, the value of the accumulative absolute load error (AALE) produced by the proposed DTSMPPC scheme coupled with the DTDO is merely 0.0575% and 0.2675% to that of the previous DTLSMC and the optimized DTPIDC, respectively, while in the presence of lumped disturbances, the value of the AALE produced by the proposed DTSMPPC scheme coupled with the DTDO is merely 0.006% and 0.1952% to that of the previous DTLSMC and the optimized DTPIDC, respectively.