An arbitrary-order continuous sliding mode control technique for nonlinear PWR-type nuclear power plants

This paper presents an arbitrary order continuous-time sliding mode controller based on the super-twisting algorithm for a nonlinear pressurized water nuclear power plant. A proportional-derivative terminal sliding surface is designed to achieve the finite time convergence and to enhanced the tracking performance. The proposed controller is chattering free, which is always preferable in most of the practical applications and, it is robust against Lipschitz in time uncertainties. The implementation of the proposed controller requires only the information about the system output, and thus, it is most suitable for large scale complex systems, such as nuclear power plants. Superiority of the proposed controller over some conventional control techniques in the presence of uncertainties is shown with the help of simulation results in the MATLAB/Simulink environment.