Active Disturbance Rejection Control of Nuclear Pressurized Water Reactor for Power Generation

Control design for pressurized water reactor (PWR) is difficult due to associated non-linearity, modelling uncertainties and time-varying system parameters. Extended state observer (ESO) based active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) presents a simple and robust control solution which is almost model free and has few tuning parameters. However, conventional ESO suffers from noise over-amplification in the obtained estimates due to high-gain construction which in turn degrades the noise sensitivity of the closed-loop system and limits the achievable dynamic performance in practical scenarios. To overcome this problem, two recent techniques namely cascade ESO (CESO) and low-power higher-order ESO (LHESO) are implemented for control of PWR. Simulation analysis conducted in MATLAB illustrates the performance improvement obtained over conventional ESO based ADRC. Extensive simulation analysis is also conducted to investigate robustness towards parametric uncertainties.