Performance Evaluation of Research Reactors Under Different Predictive Controllers

This paper is concerned with the evaluation of nuclear research reactor under two types of predictive controllers. The first one is Receding Horizon Predictive Controller (RHPC) which is considered a simple linear predictive controller. The other one is Neural Network Predictive Controller (NNPC) which is a type of nonlinear predictive controller. These controllers are applied over multi-point reactor core model. This model takes into consideration the nonlinearity of the reactor. It also takes into consideration some important physical phenomena like temperature effect, time variant fuel depletion and nonlinear xenon poisoning concentration. Simulation results showed the superiority of RHPC in both tracking and regulation. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.