Suboptimal Projective Control of a Pressurized Water Reactor

A suboptimal output feedback approach for control of the pressurized water reactor (PWR) in the H. B. Robinson nuclear power plant is presented. Optimal state feedback linear quadratic regulator (LQR) theory with pole placement capability is extended to obtain a suboptimal projective controller for such cases where the entire state vector is inaccessible for measurement and feedback purposes. The appealing feature of the proposed approach is that it is possible to select the weighting matrices in the quadratic cost functional such that the resulting control law would nearly minimize the cost, and at the same time can assign a subspectrum of the closed-loop system to preassigned desired locations. Additionally, the design algorithm is computationally very attractive, since regardless of the dimension of the PWR model the approach mainly involves low-order matrix computations. © 1989 IEE