LAUSR

Abstract The task of this investigation is to model pressurized water reactor core and design a reactor power controller that has a strong robustness in various operating conditions. The comparisons of different nodal models of the reactor core, which includes point kinetics, heat transfer between fuel and coolant, and reactivity feedbacks, indicate that the 2C/1F finite-difference nodal model with four fuel nodes has sufficient transient response accuracy. Based on the transfer function model that is obtained by linearizing the nonlinear model, a two-degree-of-freedom controller is proposed to reduce the effect of power level variation on the system dynamics. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed two-degree-of-freedom controller can give satisfying performance for both reactor power and coolant temperature over a wide range of reactor operation.