Optimal Control of a Boiling Water Reactor in Load-Following via Multilevel Methods

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Abstract
A multilevel method is applied to the load-following control of a boiling water reactor using a nodal reactor model with practical operational constraints and thermal limits. Due to the very large size of the problem, a decomposition is made using hierarchical control techniques. The optimization of the resulting subproblems is performed using the feasible direction method. An objective functional, of quadratic form, is defined to reflect the control objective, namely, to achieve the desired thermal power (tracking) with minimum effort, returning to the initial xenon and iodine concentration as closely as possible. Nodal source equation and discretized Xe-I dynamic equations are formulated as equality constraints, while the linear heat generation rate and the rate of power increase are formulated as inequality constraints. Core flow and control rod position are the control variables. A simplified model of the core is used, with 4 × 4 fuel assemblies that have one control rod at the center.