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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Da Ruan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 2 | August 2003 | Pages 227-240
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3412
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of fuzzy logic control (FLC) in the domain of the nuclear industry presents a tremendous challenge. The main reason for this is the public awareness of the risks of nuclear reactors and the very strict safety regulations in force for nuclear power plants. The very same regulations prevent a researcher from quickly introducing novel control methods into this field. On the other hand, the application of FLC has, despite the ominous sound of the word "fuzzy" to nuclear engineers, a number of very desirable advantages over classical control, e.g., its robustness and the capability to include human experience into the controller. In this paper an FLC for controlling the power level of a nuclear reactor is described. The study is intended to assess the applicability of FLC in this domain. The final goal is to develop an optimized and intrinsically safe controller. After reviewing some available literature on FLC in nuclear reactors, an FLC is proposed and first tested by comparing it with the classical controller of the Belgian reactor 1 (BR1). In the next step the BR1 at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center (SCK·CEN) was used as a test bed to implement a programmable logic controller-based hardware controller. The BR1 reactor is internationally regarded as a nuclear calibration reference. It therefore provides an excellent environment for this type of experiment because over the years considerable knowledge of the static and dynamic properties of the reactor has been accumulated. The project (1995-1999) aimed at investigating the added value and technical limits of FLC for nuclear reactor operations. The progress made in these experiments including closed-loop experiments are presented and discussed in this paper.