Diverse methods of analyzing neutron detector signal for power monitoring in commercial fast reactors

In a fast reactor, the measurement of instantaneous power, accurately at any point of time is of prime importance. To control the reactor power within its design limit for safe operation, measurement of power and safety functions operated by different systems based on power is required. This is done with neutron detectors from which signal come as current pulses in random following Poisson distribution. Due to heavy overlap, individual pulse counting is extremely difficult beyond certain frequency. So to count pulses in the detector output in a given length of time, which will be measure of power in the reactor, indirect method of signal processing is applied here. After applying signal processing methods on the detector output, linear relation is established between maximum amplitude of absolute of FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) of the signal and no of pulses in a given length of time of the signal i.e. rate of arrival of pulses to the detector. This linear relation is verified in different ways i.e. with simulated fixed rate of arrival of the pulses, random rate of arrival of the pulses and with neutron detector simulator output. The paper explains various stages of development and testing.