ESTIMATION OF TIME-VARYING REACTIVITY USING A METHOD OF NONLINEAR FILTERING

A simple method of nonlinear filtering is applied to the problem of dynamic reactivity estimation in which the law of reactivity change is assumed to be unknown. The filter is designed based on a system model containing the usual point reactor kinetics equations driven by fictitious white noises and a reactivity state equation. The nonlinear filter applied is a simple modification of the Kalman filter added with a nonlinear feedback loop. The results of the computer simulation and the experiment show that the nonlinear filter can be used to estimate the dynamic reactivity, even under an extremely noisy measurement condition.