Reduced order models, inertial manifolds, and global bifurcations: searching instability boundaries in nuclear power systems

One of the goals of nuclear power systems design and operation is to restrict the possible states of certain critical subsystems, during steady operation and during transients, to remain inside a certain bounded set of admissible states and state variations. Also, during transients, certain restrictions must be imposed on the time scale of evolution of the critical subsystem's state. A classification of the different solution types concerning their relation with the operational safety of the power plant is done by distributing the different solution types in relation with the exclusion region of the power-flow map. In the framework of an analytic or numerical modeling process of a boiling water reactor (BWR) power plant, this could imply first to find an suitable approximation to the solution manifold of the differential equations describing the stability behavior of this nonlinear system, and then a classification of the different solution types concerning their relation with the operational safety of the power plant, by distributing the different solution types in relation with the exclusion region of the power-flow map. Inertial manifold theory gives a foundation for the construction and use of reduced order models (ROM's) of reactor dynamics to discover and characterize meaningful bifurcations that may pass unnoticed during digital simulations done with full scale computer codes of the nuclear power plant. The March-Leuba's BWR ROM is used to exemplify the analytical approach developed here. The equation for excess void reactivity of this ROM is generalized. A nonlinear integral-differential equation in the logarithmic power is derived, including the generalized thermal-hydraulics feedback on the reactivity. Introducing a Krilov- Bogoliubov-Mitropolsky (KBM) ansatz with both amplitude and phase being slowly varying functions of time relative to the center period of oscillation, a coupled set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations for amplitude and phase is obtained. Analytical formulae are derived for the frequency of oscillation and the parameters that determine the stability of the steady states, including sub- and supercritical oincar?-Andronov- Hopf (AH) bifurcations. A Bautin's bifurcation scenario seems possible on the power-flow plane: near the boundary of stability, a region where stable steady states are surrounded by unstable limit cycles surrounded at their turn by stable limit cycles. The qualitative analytical results are compared with recent digital simulations and applications of semi-analytical bifurcation theory done with reduced order models of BWR.