Comparative Performance Analysis of Fractional-order Nonlinear PID controller for NPK Model of Nuclear Reactor

Nonlinear dynamics constitute a significant component in nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants must be controlled solely because of this feature to provide the demand power efficiently. A Fractional-order Nonlinear Proportional, Integral, and Derivative (FONPID) controller is proposed to incorporate into the Normalized Point Kinetic (NPK) model of the Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) for trajectory tracking and the combined disturbance rejection and noise suppression study in this work. In order to make the proposed controller robust, the controller’s gains are tuned using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) with the objective function having weighted sum of Integral of Absolute Error (IAE) performance metric. The comparative performance studies of various controllers such as Proportional, Derivative (PD), Proportional, Integral, and Derivative (PID), Nonlinear Proportional, Integral, and Derivative (NPID), and FONPID are carried out to showcase the superiority of the proposed controller. The outcomes of this comprehensive simulation study in MATLAB/Simulink environment show the performance of the FONPID controller compared with the other three specified controllers.