Study of a new Automatic Reactor Power Control for the TRIGA MARK II reactor at University of Pavia

The installation of a new Instrumentation and Control (I&C) system for the TRIGA MARK II reactor at University of Pavia has recently been completed in order to assure a safe and continuous reactor operation for the future. The intervention involved nearly the whole I&C system and required a channel-by-channel component substitution. One of the most sensitive part of the intervention concerned the Automatic Reactor Power Controller (ARPC) which permits to keep the reactor at an operator-selected power level acting on the control rod devoted to the fine regulation of system reactivity. This controller installed can be set up using different control logics: currently the system is working in relay mode. The main goal of the work presented in this paper is to set up a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) configuration of the new controller installed on the TRIGA reactor of Pavia so as to optimize the response to system perturbations.