Design an anti-windup controller for a PWR power-level control in the presence of control rod speed saturation

Abstract

Control input saturation can cause severe performance degradation and possible instability in a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). Therefore, some form of limit protection is needed. This study proposes a dynamic compensation design problem for a PWR subject to control rod speed saturation. Design of this dynamic compensator is based on minimization of a performance index. First, a nonlinear dynamic feedback controller is designed based on feedback linearization. Then based on Parseval's theorem, the dynamic compensator is design such that the auxiliary control law is the same as that without control rod speed saturation. The proposed control approach is applied to a PWR. Simulation results show that the proposed anti-windup scheme is quite effective in presence of input saturation and it has a remarkable performance for tracking reference trajectory.