A hybrid sliding mode controller approach for level control in the nuclear power plant steam generators

This work presents a hybrid sliding mode controller approach for level control in the nuclear power plant steam generators. In a nuclear power plant, the steam generator is one of the essential pieces of equipment. Therefore, this paper aims at a robust hybrid scheme that merges internal model control concepts, sliding mode control methodology, and gain scheduling using Takagi–Sugeno multimodel fuzzy systems. Since the process presents integrating and inverse response with dead time and a highly dependent response associated with the operating power variability, this work considers process identification like an optimization problem. Hence, parallel processing algorithms such as particle swarm optimization are used. The performance achieved with the new proposal is suitable for set-point tracking and disturbance rejection.