Cross-Coupled Conditional Funnel Control: A Model-Free Approach for Load-Following Operation of Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor

This study presents the design of a model-free control scheme for the load-following operation of a Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), which is a 70th-order Multi-Input Multi-Output, strongly coupled and open-loop unstable energy-generating system. To design a model-free controller for a PHWR, we propose a novel cross-coupled conditional error surface and a modified funnel algorithm-based funnel control scheme. The proposed control scheme reduces the effects of inter-zonal coupling and improves the steady-state accuracy without degrading the transient performance. The proposed control scheme is of low complexity and does not require system dynamics for controller design. A closed-loop stability analysis is carried out to ensure the boundedness of the closed-loop system trajectories. Furthermore, the proposed control scheme is evaluated by simulating different scenarios, which demonstrate its effectiveness.