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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Chaung Lin, Shyurng-Rern Chang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 107 | Number 2 | February 1991 | Pages 158-172
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE91-A15729
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An adaptive predictive control system (APCS) is applied to the design of the recirculation and feedwater control systems of a boiling water reactor. The APCS uses the dead zone method to modify the adaptive law; thus, it is stable in the presence of unmodeled dynamics and bounded disturbances. Two single-input/single-output control systems are used instead of a multi-input/multi-output control system in order to simplify parameter adaptation. The interactions among the subsystems are treated as unmeasured disturbances. A simulation using the reactor model shows that the dome pressure versus recirculation pump speed subsystem is a nonminimum-phase system. To handle this system, the weighting polynomials for the system input and output are incorporated to form an augmented minimum-phase system and then the augmented system is controlled. The proposed algorithm is stable, does not require persistent excitation of the reference input, and performs well, which makes it practical for implementation.