DESIGN OF DELAY-TOLERANT CONTROLLER FOR REMOTE CONTROL OF NUCLEAR REACTOR POWER

One of main concepts involved in regional small nuclear reactors is unmanned remote control. Internet-based virtual private networks provide environments for the remote monitoring and control of geographically-dispersed systems, and with the advances in communication technologies, the potential of networks for real time control and automation becomes enormous. However, networked control has some problems. The most critical is delay in signal transmission, which degrades system stability and performance. Therefore, a networked control system should be designed to account for delay. This paper proposes some design approaches for a delay-tolerant system that can guarantee predetermined stability margins and performance. To accomplish this, the reactor plant is modeled with consideration of uncertainties. With this model, three kinds of controllers are developed using different methods. The designed systems are compared with respect to stability and performance, and a second-order controller designed using the table lookup method was found to give the most satisfactory results.