PD Power-Level Control Design for MHTGRs

       The 6th Asia-Pacific Power and Energy Engineering Conference (APPEEC 2014)——Due to its inherent safety feature, the modular high temperature gas-cooled reactor (MHTGR) has been seen as one of the best candidates in building next generation nuclear plants (NGNPs). Since the MHTGR dynamics has high nonli-nearity, it is necessary to develop nonlinear power-level controller which is not only beneficial to the safe, stable, effi-cient and autonomous operation of the MHTGR but also easy to be implemented practically. In this paper, based on the concept of shifted-ectropy and the physically-based control design approach, it is proved theoretically that the simple proportional-differential (PD) output-feedback power-level control can provide globally asymptotic closed-loop stability. Numerical simulation results verify the theoretical results and show the influence of the controller parameters to the dynamic response.