Parameter identification and state estimation for nuclear reactor operation digital twin

Reactor Operation Digital Twin (RODT) is now receiving increasing attention and investment in nuclear engineering domain. A prototype of a RODT was first brought out by Gong et al. at Nuclear Power Institute of China. The RODT contains a forward solver for online real-time simulation and an inverse problem solver for parameter identification and state estimation. To further improve the efficiency and accuracy of RODT and promote the practical deployment of RODT (i) we first propose an advanced differential evolution algorithm to upgrade the inverse solver; (ii) then we bring out a systematical uncertainty quantification of RODT considering assimilation noisy observations. The accuracy and validity of the proposed RODT are tested along one cycle operating stage of HPR1000, at various operating temperatures, control rod steps, general power level and the inlet temperature of a practical nuclear reactor core. Numerous numerical results confirm its potential for practical engineering applications for on-line parameter identification and state estimation. •An advanced differential evolution algorithm is implemented into the proposed RODT.•Observation denoising is realized with PCA followed by a normalization process.•Numerical tests on HPR1000 proof its efficiency and accuracy of the improved RODT.