On the Use of Support Vector Regression Technique for the Analysis of Rod Ejection Accidents

The rod ejection accident (REA) is the design-basis reactivity initiated event and an important aspect for a pressurized water reactor (PWR). The consequence of REA is that it introduces a large positive reactivity insertion in a core, which leads to a fast large power excursion and other parameters changing. Thus, it is important to understand the uncertainty in the parameters of reactor core when REA happens. This paper applies support vector regression (SVR) to analyze accident scenarios with control rod ejection. SVR is an approach based on machine learning and soft computing. SVR, by definition, is an application of support vector machine (SVM) to nonlinear regression problem. Furthermore, the objective of this paper is to train SVR model to identify both safe and potentially unsafe power plant conditions based on real time plant data. The data is obtained from computer generated accident scenarios and is divided into two datasets, training datasets and test datasets. The training dataset are used to train the SVR model and the test dataset are used to test the validation of this model. And then the results obtained by SVR model are compared with that of artificial neural network (ANN) model. The comparison results show that SVR model has superior performance over ANN model and agree well with the general understanding. Because the proposed methodology achieve accurate results, it is likely to be suitable for other data processing of nuclear engineering.