Abstract
Because of the strong inherent safety feature, the modular high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor (MHTGR) is quite proper to be used to build a new generation of nuclear power plants. Motivated by the large scale asymptotic closed- loop stability provided by nonlinear controllers, a nonlinear power-level regulation strategy based on both the techniques of feedback dissipation and well-established backstepping is presented in this paper. The virtue of this control strategy, i.e. the ability of globally asymptotic stabilization is based on the inherent zero-state detectability property of the dynamics of the MHTGR. This controller is also robust to the modeling uncertainty in control rod dynamics, and moreover if the rod modeling uncertainty is small enough then this controller is simplified to the classical proportional feedback controller. Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulation shows the feasibility of this novel power-level control strategy.
