A comparative study of Kalman filter and Linear Matrix Inequality based H infinity filter for SPND delay compensation

•Derivation for delay compensation algorithm using recursive Kalman filter.•Derivation for delay compensation algorithm using Linear Matrix Inequality based H infinity filter.•Process modeling suitable for delay compensation.•Dynamic tuning of the delay compensation algorithm for both Kalman and H infinity filter.•Simulations and trade-off curve for Kalman and H infinity filter.

This paper deals with delay compensation of vanadium Self Powered Neutron Detectors (SPNDs) using Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) based H-infinity filtering method and compares the results with Kalman filtering method. The entire study is established upon the framework of neutron flux estimation in large core Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) in which delayed SPNDs such as vanadium SPNDs are used as in-core flux monitoring detectors. The use of vanadium SPNDs are limited to 3-D flux mapping despite of providing better Signal to Noise Ratio as compared to other prompt SPNDs, due to their small prompt component in the signal. The use of an appropriate delay compensation technique has been always considered to be an effective strategy to build a prompt and accurate estimate of the neutron flux. We also indicate the noise-response trade-off curve for both the techniques. Since all the delay compensation algorithms always suffer from noise amplification, we propose an efficient adaptive parameter tuning technique for improving performance of the filtering algorithm against noise in the measurement.