Robust nonlinear control of nuclear reactors under model uncertainty

Abstract

A nonlinear model-based control method is developed for the robust control of a nuclear reactor. The nonlinear plant model is used to design a unique control law which covers a wide operating range. The robustness is a crucial factor for the fully automatic control of reactor power due to time-varying, uncertain parameters, and state estimation error, or unmodeled dynamics. A variable structure control (VSC) method is introduced which consists of an adaptive performance specification (fime control) after the tracking error reaches the narrow boundary-layer by a time-optimal control (coarse control). Variable structure control is a powerful method for nonlinear system controller design which has inherent robustness to parameter variations or external disturbances using the known uncertainty bounds, and it requires very low computational efforts. In spite of its desirable properties, conventional VSC presents several important drawbacks that limit its practical applicability. One of the most undesirable phenomena is chattering, which implies extremely high control activity and may excite high-frequency unmodeled dynamics. This problem is due to the neglected actuator time-delay or sampling effects. The problem was partially remedied by replacing chattering control by a smooth control inter-polation in a boundary layer neighnboring a time-varying sliding surface. But, for the nuclear reactor systems which has very fast dynamic response, the sampling effect may destroy the narrow boundary layer when a large uncertainty bound is used. Due to the very short neutron life time, large uncertainty bound leads to the high gain in feedback control. To resolve this problem, a derivative feedback is introduced that gives excellent performance by reducing the uncertainty bound. The stability of tracking error dynamics is guaranteed by the second method of Lyapunov using the two-level uncertainty bounds that are obtained from the knowledge of uncertainty bound and the estimate...