Linear active disturbance rejection control for pressurized water reactor power

Since dynamic of pressurized water reactor (PWR) power is quite nonlinear, uncertain and time-varying, the reliable power-level control of PWR is necessary to guarantee high efficiency and safety of nuclear power plant. In this paper, a robust power-level regulation scheme based on linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) is presented for PWR. Its structure is simple and the Bandwidth-Parameterization based controller tuning is easy. First, the second order model with uncertainty is derived from a 18th order nonlinear model of PWR. And based on the derived model, two LADRC systems are designed for power control with and without model information respectively. Simulation results show the designed controllers both have satisfactory performance over the wide range of reactor operating conditions, while LADRC with model information has faster response, less overshoot, better disturbance rejection ability and robustness.