Supporting the reactivity of nuclear power plants using an optimized FOPID controller with arithmetic algorithm: Toward an environmentally sustainable energy system

The adaptability of the power system needs to be improved due to the significant growth in the share of variable renewable electricity generation. Enhancing the flexibility of low-carbon sources, including nuclear power plants (NPPs), is essential to achieving this goal while reducing CO 2 emissions. Reactivity, a measure of a nuclear reactor's critical state, is a commonly used metric in the nuclear industry. Reactivity can be controlled through a reactor control (RC), which poses a significant challenge in NPPs. This study focuses on designing and implementing an optimized fractional-order proportional-integral-derivative controller (FOPIDC) to support the reactivity of NPPs through RC. The FOPIDC controls the movement of the rod to match the reactor system's reactivity for power regulation during load-following operations. The gains of the FOPIDC are optimized using the arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. A comparison between AOA and PSO techniques is presented to demonstrate the usefulness and superiority of AOA. Simulation outcomes reveal that AOA-FOPIDC is performing better than PSO-FOPIDC, which is 25% faster in settling time in dynamic conditions with an overshoot reduced by 38%. In addition, the proposed method exhibited better stability and the ability to cope with reactivity perturbations owing to Xenon and Iodine more rapidly. All of these findings indicate that AOA could be a strong potential tuning method for nuclear reactor control systems under flexible grid operations. The MATLAB/SIMULINK software is used for all studied scenarios.