Nuclear Thermal Rocket Emulator for a Hardware-in-the-Loop Test Bed

Brandon A. Wilson (), Jono McConnell, Wesley C. Williams, Nick Termini, Craig Gray, Charles E. Taylor and N. Dianne Ezell Bull
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Brandon A. Wilson: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
Jono McConnell: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
Wesley C. Williams: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
Nick Termini: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
Craig Gray: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
Charles E. Taylor: Department of Petroleum Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70802, USA
N. Dianne Ezell Bull: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 16, 1-11

Abstract: To support NASA’s mission to use nuclear thermal rockets for future Mars missions, an instrumentation and control test bed has been built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system is designed as a hardware-in-the-loop test bed for testing control elements and autonomous control algorithms for nuclear thermal propulsion rockets. The mock reactor system consists of a modular and scalable framework, using inexpensive components and open-source software. The hardware system consists of a two-phase flow loop and a mock reactor with six control drums. A single-board computer (NVIDIA Jetson) handles reactor core emulation and hosts a message queuing telemetry transport broker that allows user-deployed control algorithms to interact with the system hardware. The reactor emulator receives sensor data from the hardware and provides the simulated performance of the reactor under steady-state, transient, and fault conditions. The emulator uses a reactivity lookup table and the point kinetics equations to solve for the reactor dynamics in real time. Emulated reactor dynamics and sensor input inform the autonomous control algorithm’s decision-making in a closed-loop manner. The current system is capable of operating at 10 Hz, but faster cycle rates are an area of ongoing research. This test bed will enable NASA and other space vendors to rigorously test their autonomous control systems for NTP rockets under transient (reactor startup and shutdown), steady-state, and fault conditions to reduce development time and risk for autonomous control systems in future missions.

Keywords: nuclear thermal rocket; autonomous control; hardware-in-the-loop (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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