Proportional-Integral Disturbance Observer of Nuclear Reactors

A proportional-integral disturbance observer (PI-DO) for monitoring nuclear reactors is newly proposed, which is driven by the measurements of neutron flux and coolant temperature at reactor inlet as well as their integrations. This PI-DO provides a globally asymptotic estimation with a bounded steady-state error for the reactor key process variables as well as the total disturbances in channels of the neutron kinetics and primary coolant thermal-hydraulics. Moreover, the PI-DO is applied to reconstruct the unmeasurable state variables and total disturbances of a nuclear heating reactor (NHR). Numerical simulation results not only verify the theoretic analysis but also show both the satisfactory performance and the influence of observer parameters.