As a highly safety-critical system, it is insufficient for the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) Instrumentation and Control (I&C) system to simply rely on a conventional control schemes or controllers which only satisfy stability and performance specification to the perturbation of the nominal plant. Since the current operating or newly-built I&C systems are based on transferring or adapting modern high performance electronic devices, it provides the hardware foundation and possibility to incorporate more advanced control systems into nuclear systems to achieve higher safety and stable performance, even in unexpected faulty situations. Active Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) is one of the choices for such advanced control. Active FTC encompasses the following components: 1. nominal controller design, 2. sensors and actuators fault detection and isolation, and 3. fault estimation and fault accommodation. In this research, approaches for each component are integrated into an active FTC scheme. Following this, the active FTC scheme is applied to a point kinetic rector model with fuel temperature and coolant temperature effect to reactivity. Simulation results show that the active FTC scheme designed in this research can effectively track the global power set point, even under situations with single fault from actuator or sensors.
Gremlins: an Architectural Framework for Reconfigurable Autonomous Robots