The nonlinear dynamics and multiple interacting loops in pressurized water reactors (PWRs) make control design challenging, particularly when load-following and safety constraints must be handled simultaneously. Building on the detailed 27-state PWR model developed by Vajpayee et al. (2020), this paper presents a MATLAB/Simulink implementation of the complete reactor-steam-generator-pressurizer system, utilizing it as a benchmark to compare several standard control strategies. The model includes point-kinetics, thermal–hydraulic, piping, plenum, steam-generator, and pressurizer dynamics, and is validated against the transient responses reported in Vajpayee et al. (2020) for rod, heater, turbine-valve, and feedwater disturbances. Four controllers are implemented for the same multivariable control problem (reactor power, pressurizer pressure, steam pressure, and pressurizer level): a proportional-integral (PI) controller, a linear model predictive controller (MPC), a gain-scheduled MPC (GSMPC), and a nonlinear MPC (NMPC). These controllers were tested under 2 scenarios: power ramping (up and down) to evaluate their regulatory performance and feed-water disturbances to evaluate disturbance rejection. For each controller, we document the design workflow, tuning parameters, and constraints. Closed-loop performance is evaluated using standard integral error indices and selected load-following and disturbance-rejection scenarios, together with average computation time per sampling instant. The results show that, with fair tuning, MPC-based strategies significantly reduce power-tracking integral time absolute error and settling time compared with PI control, while GSMPC can approximate NMPC performance over a wide operating range at lower computational cost, which proves its feasibility for real-time applications. The implementation details and benchmark scenarios provided here are intended to support reproducible studies and further development of advanced control methods for PWRs.
Rahim et al. (Wed,) studied this question.