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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Katsuo Suzuki, Koiti Watanabe
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 145-154
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of nonlinear filtering is applied to the problem of estimating the dynamic reactivity of a nonlinear reactor system. The nonlinear filtering algorithm developed is a simple modification of a linear H∞ optimal filter with a nonlinear feedback loop added. The linear filter is designed on the basis of a linearized dynamical system model that consists of linearized point reactor kinetic equations and a reactivity state equation driven by a fictitious signal. The latter is artificially introduced to deal with the reactivity as a state variable. The results of the computer simulation show that the nonlinear filtering algorithm can be applied to estimate the dynamic reactivity of the nonlinear reactor system, even under relatively large reactivity disturbances.