Core failure diagnosis with pattern recognition

It is very important to diagnose the misloading after the reactor initial loading. The author proposes a diagnosis method which combines the harmonics synthesis method (HSM) and pattern recognition principle (PRP). According to HSM, the neutron flux distribution can be expressed by a linear combination of the higher order harmonics. The author takes their harmonics coefficients as the pattern features. Using PRP, the pattern for the reactor is identified from many possible patterns which are defined from some typical core failures (including normal condition) in advance. So the core failure is diagnosed. It has the advantages, such as meaningful and reasonable diagnostic result, high random error tolerance, simple and fast of calculation process, etc. It can easily and efficiently diagnose the core failure such as the detector malfunction, misloading, etc