Adaptive Extended Kalman Filtering for Reactivity Estimation

Abstract

Reactivity control plays an important role in ensuring the safe operation of a nuclear power plant. However, no physical sensor is available to measure it. It can be inferred indirectly either from the reactor period or from the reactor flux variation. To obtain the variation of reactivity inside the reactor core, various techniques based on deterministic as well as stochastic frameworks has been reported in literature. In this paper an adaptive Extended Kalman Filter based online reactivity estimator is proposed and its superiority over its existing counterpart is established in terms of estimation quality under healthy and unhealthy measurement conditions.