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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Peiwei Sun, Ji Feng, Xianbao Yuan, Liang Zhao, Furong Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 35-46
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1322396
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Canadian SuperCritical Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR) is a once-through pressure tube–type SCWR under development in Canada. It is a multivariable system with strong cross coupling and a high degree of nonlinearity. The outputs are sensitive to disturbances, and the variations in the thermal parameters should be limited to avoid thermal stress to its components. Therefore, designing an adequate control system is challenging. In this paper, robust multivariable feedback control and feedforward control are proposed to design the control system of the Canadian SCWR. Three uncertainty sources are considered: unmodeled uncertainty, linearization uncertainty, and model reduction uncertainty. These uncertainties are evaluated taking into account all aspects affecting the linear dynamic model used in the robust controller synthesis, and the uncertainty bounds are determined to cover the uncertainties. The robust feedback controller is synthesized using the μ-synthesis approach. The feedforward control is added to the robust feedback control to further improve the control performance. It is obtained through disturbance compensation features for a feedforward controller. The control performance of the hybrid control system is evaluated based on the nonlinear simulation by introducing different setpoint changes. The designed control system can stabilize the Canadian SCWR, and the control performance is satisfactory.