Active disturbance rejection control of pressurizer pressure during startup process in a pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant

To cope with the participation of power plant peak shaving and realize the diversification of nuclear energy applications including cogeneration, desalination, etc. The application of automatic procedure startup and shutdown system (APS) is an important research direction to improve the safety, economy and flexibility of pressurized water reactor (PWR) nuclear power plant (NPP). But it is difficult to realize automatic control of pressurizer pressure in the PWR NPP startup condition with drastic changes and disturbances. To solve this problem, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) algorithm was proposed for the pressure control of the pressurizer. The controller parameters were tuned based on a two-step tuning scheme. Its control performance and disturbance rejection ability were studied and compared with proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller under different operation conditions. The simulation results showed that the designed controller with fixed parameters can outperform the PID controller with specific optimized parameters on setpoint tracking and disturbance rejection. This study is of great significance for realizing the automatic control of pressurizer pressure in the startup process, and can provide reference for the design of the automatic control system during PWR startup. The controller was applied in typical startup process and achieved satisfactory control performance.