Automatic generation control design of PWR plants through active disturbance rejection

The flexibility of PWR plants is positive for keeping the grid stability while deepening the penetration of renewables, which heavily relies on the automatic generation control (AGC) function of the plant coordination control system. In this paper, an AGC law is proposed for the widely used PWR plants, which is further realized by the stabilizers of grid frequency and plant main steam pressure. The design of the pressure and frequency stabilizers is transferred to the disturbance attenuation problem of a second-order dynamic system. Then, an active disturbance attenuation control (ADRC) is then proposed, which is just the addition of a feedback control given by a proportional-integral (PI) law and a feedforward control driven by a disturbance observer (DO). The newly-built ADRC is then applied to realize the AGC function for a nuclear heating reactor plant, and numerical simulation results show the satisfactory performance.