In Core Fuel Management Using Linear Optimization Techniques

Author : Hing Yan Watt
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 506 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (253 download)

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Download or read book Incremental Costs and Optimization of In-core Fuel Management of Nuclear Power Plants written by Hing Yan Watt and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is concerned with development of methods for optimizing the energy production and refuelling decision for nuclear power plants in an electric utility system containing both nuclear and fossil-fuelled stations. The objective is to minimize the revenue requirements for refuelling the power plants during the planning horizon; the decision variables are the energy generation, reload enrichment and batch fraction for each reactor cycle; the constraints are that the customer's load demand, as well as various other operational and engineering requirements be satisfied. This problem can be decomposed into two sub-problems. The first sub-problem is concerned with scheduling energy between nuclear reactors which have been fuelled in an optimal fashion. The second sub-problem is concerned with optimizing the fuelling of nuclear reactors given an optimized energy schedule. These two sub-problems when solved iteratively and interactively, would yield an optimal solution to the original problem. The problem of optimal energy scheduling between nuclear reactors can be formulated as a linear program. The incremental cost of energy is required as input to the linear program. Three methods of calculating incremental cost are considered: the Rigorous Method, based on the definition of partial derivativesis accurate but time consuring; the Inventory Value Method and the Linearization Method, based respectively on equations of inventory evaluation and linearization, are less accurate, but efficient. The latter two methods are recommended for the early stages of optimization. The problem of optimizing the fuelling of nuclear reactors has been solved for two cases: the special case of steady state operation, and the general case of nonsteady- state operation. The steady-state case has been solved by simple graphic techniques. The results indicate that reactors should be refuelled with as small a batch fraction as allowed by burnup constraints. The non-steady case has been solved by polynomial approximation, in which the objective function as well as the constraints are approximated by a sum of polynomials. The results indicate that the final selection of an optimal solution from a set of sub-optimal solutions is primarily based on engineering considerations, and not on economics considerations.