Fractional Order Fuzzy Control of Nuclear Reactor Power with Thermal-Hydraulic Effects in the Presence of Random Network Induced Delay and Sensor Noise having Long Range Dependence

TL;DR

This paper develops a fractional order fuzzy PID controller for nuclear reactor power regulation, demonstrating robustness across different power levels and effectively handling network delays and sensor noise with long-range dependence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fractional order fuzzy PID controller tuned with genetic algorithms for nuclear reactors, accounting for stochastic delays and noise effects.

Findings

Fuzzy FO PID controllers outperform conventional fuzzy PID in simulations.

Controllers tuned at high power levels are effective across various operating conditions.

The approach effectively manages network delays and sensor noise with long-range dependence.

Abstract

Nonlinear state space modeling of a nuclear reactor has been done for the purpose of controlling its global power in load following mode. The nonlinear state space model has been linearized at different percentage of reactor powers and a novel fractional order (FO) fuzzy proportional integral derivative (PID) controller is designed using real coded Genetic Algorithm (GA) to control the reactor power level at various operating conditions. The effectiveness of using the fuzzy FOPID controller over conventional fuzzy PID controllers has been shown with numerical simulations. The controllers tuned with the highest power models are shown to work well at other operating conditions as well; over the lowest power model based design and hence are robust with respect to the changes in nuclear reactor operating power levels. This paper also analyzes the degradation of nuclear reactor power signal due to network induced random delays in shared communication network and due to sensor noise while being fed-back to the Reactor Regulating System (RRS). The effect of long range dependence (LRD) which is a practical consideration for the stochastic processes like network induced delay and sensor noise has been tackled by optimum tuning of FO fuzzy PID controllers using GA, while also taking the operating point shift into consideration.