Time-optimal control of nuclear reactor power with adaptive proportional-integral-feedforward gains

A time-optimal control method which consists of coarse and fine control stages is described. During the coarse control stage, the maximum control effort (time-optimal) is used to direct the system toward the switching boundary, which is set near the desired power level. At this boundary, the controller is switched to the fine control stage in which an adaptive proportional-integral-feedforward controller is used to compensate for any unmodeled reactivity feedback effects. This fine control is also introduced to obtain a constructive method for determining the (adaptive) feedback gains against the sampling effect. The feedforward control term is included to suppress the over- or undershoot. The estimation and feedback of the temperature-induced reactivity are also discussed