Nonlinear Adaptive Dynamic Output-Feedback Power-Level Control of Nuclear Heating Reactors

Zhe Dong

doi:10.1155/2013/794167

Abstract

Due to the high safety performance of small nuclear reactors, there is a promising future for small reactors. Nuclear heating reactor (NHR) is a small reactor that has many advanced safety features such as the integrated arrangement, natural circulation at any power levels, self-pressurization, hydraulic control rod driving, and passive residual heating removing and can be applied to the fields of district heating, seawater desalination, and electricity production. Since the NHR dynamics has strong nonlinearity and uncertainty, it is meaningful to develop the nonlinear adaptive power-level control technique. From the idea of physically based control design method, a novel nonlinear adaptive power-level control is given for the NHR in this paper. It is theoretically proved that this newly built controller does not only provide globally asymptotic closed-loop stability but is also adaptive to the system uncertainty. Numerical simulation results show the feasibility of this controller and the relationship between the performance and controller parameters.

Highlights

Due to the serious climate and environment problems such as global warming that caused by those greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels, it is significant for people to develop clean energy
After the severe Fukushima nuclear accident, much more attention has to be drawn on safety issues of nuclear plants. In contrast to those large nuclear reactors, small reactors usually has low power density which leads to higher safety performance and can be built near big cities for district heating, seawater desalination, and electricity production
To verify the feasibility and the performance of nonlinear adaptive dynamic output-feedback power-level control strategy (78), it is applied to the power-level regulation of an Nuclear heating reactor (NHR) with the thermal power of 200 MW

Summary

Introduction

Due to the serious climate and environment problems such as global warming that caused by those greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels, it is significant for people to develop clean energy. Dong presented a dynamic output feedback dissipation controller [13] based on both backstepping technique [14] and dissipation-based high gain filter (DHGF) [15, 16] Though these nonlinear controllers provide both globally asymptotic closed-loop stability and load-following performance, they are too complicated to be implemented practically. A dynamic output-feedback nonlinear adaptive power-level control law is presented for the NHR through the physically based approach This new powerlevel control guarantees load-following performance through providing both the globally asymptotic closed-loop stability and the adaption capability to slowly varying uncertainty. This newly built control is applied to the power-level regulation of a NHR, and numerical simulation results show both its feasibility and the relationship between its control performance and values of controller parameters

Problem Formulation

Nonlinear Adaptive Power-Level Control Design

Simulation Results with Discussion

Conclusion