An optimized steam generator level control of HPR-1000 unit under severe conditions. (MATLAB Files)

Maintaining the steam generator (SG) level within safe operational limits is critical, as high level leads to turbine trip and low levels cause reactor trip. Any mismatch in feedwater and steam flow manifests a non-minimum phase behavior with varying severity across different power levels due to the swell and shrink phenomenon of the two-phase mixture in the SG. This research work develops a model of 1100 MWe NPP cascaded SG level control in the MATLAB environment. Some of the prominent PID tuning methods have been implemented to obtain improved performance. Afterwards, a Generalized Predictive Control (GPC) based feedwater flow control for inner loop and self-tuning adaptive level control on the outer loop is designed. The adaptive control shows high performance results over a wide power range, where conventional PID becomes detuned with power variation as the system model also changes. Various common disturbances effects observed in real-world scenarios were simulated, and the proposed control strategy yielded promising results.