Identification of the core temperature in a fractional order noisy environment for thermal feedback in nuclear reactors

In this paper, the core temperature of a 540 MWe Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) has been estimated from the measured temperature of the coolant using system identification techniques. The formulation is done considering fractional order (FO) dynamics for the sensor noise (i.e. 1/f
^α
noise) and the conventional white noise in measurement. Performance study with different least square based linear estimators and nonlinear AutoRegressive eXogenous (ARX) and nonlinear Hammerstein-Wiener class of estimators for system identification has been done to show their relative merits to handle fractional order noise dynamics for estimating reactor core temperature.