Development of Microcontroller Based Low Level Nuclear Reactor Power Measurement

Wide-range power channel is a device to measure nuclear reactor power, with a measurement range of more than ten decades. This wide-range power channel usually works in multiple operation modes: pulse mode at a low power level, Campbell mode, and current mode at a high power level. Research to simplify this operation by using Campbell mode only was started in Kartini reactor. To understand and compare power measurement results between pulse mode and Campbell mode, especially at low power level, it is necessary to build a neutron counting system to measure reactor power. This counting system consist of a signal conditioning circuit and an ESP32 microcontroller to count the pulse signal. The neutron counting system was tested to measure artificial signals up to 50 kHz, and the system showed a good result with average error of 0.77%. The counting system was then used to measure signal from neutron detector with the reactor operated from 1E-6 kW up to 1E-2 kW, and the counting result was compared to the reactor power measurement. From this comparison, a linear equation was obtained to determine log reactor power as a function of log neutron count. This linear equation a has coefficient of determination=0.9987.