Integrated robust and resilient control of nuclear power plants for operational safety and high performance

This paper presents an integrated robust and resilient control strategy to enhance the operational safety and performance of nuclear power plants. The objective of robust control is to minimize the sensitivity of plant operations to exogenous disturbances and internal faults while achieving a guaranteed level of performance with a priori specified bounds of uncertainties. On the other hand, the role of resilient control is to enhance plant recovery from unanticipated adverse conditions and faults as well as from emergency situations by altering its operational envelope in real time. In this paper, the issues of real-time resilient control of nuclear power plants are addressed for fast response during emergency operations while the features of the existing robust control technology are retained during normal operations under both steady-state and transient conditions. The proposed control methodology has been validated on the International Reactor Innovative & Secure (IRIS) simulator of nuclear power plants.