Design of an adaptive predictive controller for steam generators

The water level control of a nuclear steam generator is very important to secure the sufficient cooling inventory for the nuclear reactor and, at the same time, to prevent the damage of turbine blades. The dynamics of steam generators is very different according to power levels and changes as time goes on. The generalized predictive control method is used to solve an optimization problem for the finite future time steps at current time and to implement only the first control input among the solved optimal control inputs of several time steps. A recursive parameter estimation algorithm estimates on-line the mathematical model of steam generator every time step to generate the linear controller design model. In this work, by combining these generalized predictive control method and recursive parameter estimation algorithm, a new controller is designed to control the water level of nuclear steam generators. It is shown through application to a linear model and a nonlinear model of steam generators that the proposed controller has good performance.