Improvement of Water level controller for Nuclear Steam Generator at Low Power Operation

Poor control of the nuclear steam generator (SG) water level of pressurized Water Reactor can lead to frequent reactor shutdowns. In addition, the steam generator is a highly complex, nonlinear and time-varying system and its parameters vary with operating conditions. The dynamics of a nuclear steam generator is very different according to the power levels and changes as time goes on. Therefore, it is an intractable as well as challenging task to improve the water level control system of the SG. In this paper, two Fuzzy controller methods are developed for the level control problem to attain a good performance at low power. The proposed controllers were compared with two element PI controller in controlling the water level of SG. Computer simulations show that the proposed controller improves transient response of steam generator water level through low range power operation and demonstrate its superiority to existing controllers. KeywordsNuclear steam generator, nuclear power station, fuzzy control, advanced control