Fractional order PID controller for power control in perturbed pressurized heavy water reactor

This paper presents an interval fractional-order proportional integral derivative (INFOPID) controller design for the power control of a highly nonlinear Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) under step-back condition. A single robust INFOPID controller is designed utilizing stability boundary locus method for eight nuclear reactor models considering eight interval conditions for each reactor model of the PHWR. The interval models have been obtained using Edge theorem. Simulation results show that the proposed INFOPID controller applied for active step-back in the reactor gives an efficient set point tracking performance, defined for variation in initial power level or control rod drop. The performance of the proposed INFOPID controller is evaluated using different integral error criterion by comparing its performance with existing methods in the literature. The proposed controller is found to give better results than the existing techniques.