Network Control System Applied to a Large Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor

The advent of low latency message passing has opened up the possibility of using distributed real-time controllers to be used for process control applications. The paper presents the use of embedded controllers over a network for control of a Pressurized Heavy Water Nuclear Reactor. The reactor which is physically divided into 14 physical zones is represented by a system having 56state variables, 14 inputs which correspond to the reactivity applied to each zone and 14 outputs which represent the power produced by the individual zones. For the present paper, it is assumed that the system is controllable and observable and the sensors along with the controllers are integrated over a 100 Mbps Ethernet LAN with UDP/IP as the communication protocol. A linear state feedback controller is implemented over network and the response is found satisfactory. The results have been compared to results reported in published papers using centralized control.