Abstract
Because of its strong inherent safety features and the high outlet temperature, the modular high temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor (MHTGR) is the chosen technology for a new generation of nuclear power plants. Such power plants are being considered for industrial applications with a wide range of power levels, thus power-level regulation is very important for their efficient and stable operation. Exploiting the large scale asymptotic closed-loop stability provided by nonlinear controllers, a nonlinear power-level regulator is presented in this paper that is based upon both the techniques of feedback dissipation and well-established backstepping. The virtue of this control strategy, i.e., the ability of globally asymptotic stabilization, is that it takes advantage of the inherent zero-state detectability property of the MHTGR dynamics. Moreover, this newly built power-level regulator is also robust towards modeling uncertainty in the control rod dynamics. If modeling uncertainty of the control rod dynamics is small enough to be omitted, then this control law can be simplified to a classical proportional feedback controller. The comparison of the control performance between the newly-built power controller and the simplified controller is also given through numerical study and theoretical analysis.
Highlights
After the Fukushima accident, safety issues have become more important in the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs)
For the high temperature gas-cooled reactors whose dynamics is described by Equations (7)–(9), we firstly consider the following subsystem: x = f ( x ) + g ( x ) ξ where variables x, ξ are given by Equations (3) and (4) respectively, and vector-valued functions f(x) and g(x) are determined by (8) and (9) respectively
Because of its inherent stability and safety, the modular high temperature gas-cooled reactor is a strong candidate for the generation of nuclear energy systems
Summary
After the Fukushima accident, safety issues have become more important in the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs). Due to its inherent safety features and competitive economics, the modular high temperature gas-cooled reactor (MHGTR) has been identified as one of main candidates for generation-IV NPPs, and will become an important future option for nuclear energy in the 21st century [1,2,3,4]. The inherent safety features of MHTGR are based on the fact that the core power density is low enough so that in any conceivable accident the fuel element temperature will not surpass its upper limit, even when only passive means for decay heat removal are employed.
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