Advanced heavy water reactor (AHWR) is a type of advanced nuclear reactor which is the most efficient nuclear fission reactor for power generation due to the large thorium reserve. Its safe, stable, and efficient operations are critical for the revival of the fission energy sector. Incorporation of a robust control scheme into the nuclear reactor model is required for proper trajectory tracking of demand power. The AHWRs are coupled, significantly nonlinear, and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. External disruptions and time-varying characteristics harm the systems' performance. As a result, the controller built for these systems must be able to deal with the complexity, which is most challenging for control engineers. A fractional-order nonlinear proportional, integral, and derivative (FONPID) control method is presented in this study for normalized power distribution management of the AHWR using normalized point kinetic equations (NPKEs) for trajectory tracking, disturbance rejection, and noise suppression tasks to improve the output power. All controller settings are fine-tuned using a genetic algorithm (GA) with the sum integral of time and square error (ITSE). The suggested FONPID controllers' performance is compared to its integer-order control structure, i.e., NPID and classical PID control structure. External disturbances at controller output and random noise at the sensor output are tested for resilience to establish the usefulness of the suggested control methods. The simulation results showcased that the proposed FONPID controller outperforms its integer-order (10) counterpart as well as the traditional PID controller.
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