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  Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
  Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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This paper presents a decoupling algorithm for a large pressurized heavy water reactor to facilitate the design of a decentralized control system. The reactor models are generally high-order systems, which increases the difficulty of designing control systems. A convenient method of model reduction while maintaining the important dynamic characteristics of the process is through decoupling. The new decoupling algorithm proposed in this paper is used to create a decoupled system for decentralized controller design. To demonstrate the performance of this algorithm, a 72nd-order system was decoupled into three partitions, each containing 20, 27, and 25 states. Both a centralized controller based on the original model and decentralized controllers based on the decoupled model are designed. The advantage of the decentralized controller is shown through a fail-safe study.