• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.125-135
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• 1993

The safe and efficient operation of nuclear plants is recognized to be accomplished through the application of plant automation using digital technology, which is one of main targets of the next generation nuclear plants. For plant level automation, it is first required that each major subsystem be digitalized, and the steam generator water level control system is discussed in this study. The transfer functions between inputs and the level are derived by employing the thermal hydraulic model of the steam generator and are applied to the analysis of the current three-element control system. Since the control scheme in this study includes the steam generator itself as a process plant, the system order is high and the numerical instability arises in digitalizing. Together with this, the unreliability of the feedwater feedback signal at low power level leads to the proposal of a two-element control system with a proper digital controller. The digital PI controller developed for this system has the initial power adaptive gain and integration time constant. And it makes the overall system response satisfy the stability and other necessary control specifications simultaneously. Since the two-element control system using this controller depends on the initial power only, it is simple to define and it shows a similar level response behavior to that of its corresponding analog system.