Fabrication of a Control Rod Drive Mechanism Emulator for Nuclear Reactors

This paper presents a simple facility that will demonstrate the automated control mechanism of a control rod by Arduino and thus, with the change of the worth of the control rod, the temperature will decrease or increase. Here, the change in temperature is emulated as the reactivity of a nuclear power reactor. A control rod is eliminated from or inserted into the reactor core to increase or decrease reactivity which is demonstrated as temperature in this work. The control rod drive mechanism regulates the power of the reactor and eradicates the risk of any accident by shutting down the reactor. In this paper, an emulator of an automated control rod drive mechanism is fabricated, which will control the position of the control rod by measuring the temperature of the coolant. From the accumulated data, a graphical representation is shown between temperature and the position of the control rod with the help of MATLAB. The SCRAM operation has also been demonstrated with this system. This emulator also includes an emergency Boron injection system when a SCRAM point is obtained.