Suboptimal Control Study of a Nuclear Power Plant

Concepts of modern control theory and, in particular, of optimal control have been used to develop a general and systematic method of regulator design starting from the non-linear mathematical model of the plant. This method was applied to the study of the control of a nuclear reactor plant of the SGHWR type (steam generating heavy water reactor), of 105 MW electric power, working at the Atomic Energy Authority Establishment, Winfrith, Dorset, England. The optimal linear regulator, computed for the free system, is incorporated into the system with saturation limits on its control inputs. This is one reason for suboptimality. Then only measurable state variables carrying large amounts of feedback control (compared with the rest of the variables) were used on the regulator, hence the second reason for suboptimality. In the course of this work a new method of optimal linear regulator design for external disturbances was applied. It is computationally very simple and also permits a simple calculation of transients by using the same eigenvector matrix regardless of the disturbance. * Soreq Nuclear Research Centre, Yavne, Israel. ** CDC 6600 with a store of 131K of 60 bit-long