Design and Development of Modern Controllers for CANDU Reactor

The safe and reliable controlling with sufficient accuracy of the nuclear reactor has been a challenging task since its invention. The dilemma of the thesis is to design the modern controllers for the CANDU reactor that not only provide the safe and reliable operation of the reactor but also to control the reactor fast and accurate. The Optimal PID and Fuzzy controllers are focused in this thesis. To design such controllers, the model based designed strategy has been adopted in this thesis. Therefore, a higher order model of CANDU reactor has been developed in this research work. The model is then linearized in order to design the PID controller optimized by Nelder-Mead Algorithm. A modern Fuzzy logic controller is designed using the Mamdani inference engine. Both the controllers are tested, simulated and validated for the step power change and under the reactivity disturbances. A comprehensive performance analysis is conducted and both controllers found extremely robust. (author)