An Adjoint-Based Differentiable Physics Framework for Online Parameter Inversion in Closed-Brayton Gas-Cooled Reactor Digital Twins
Digital twins for advanced reactors must invert physical parameters online from noisy, partial sensor streams while the plant is rarely at steady state. Gradient-based inversion is the natural tool for this task, but the forward models in routine use are seldom differentiable end to end, so practitioners fall back on derivative-free filters. We present an end-to-end-differentiable digital twin of a closed-Brayton gas-cooled reactor that propagates reverse-mode automatic differentiation through an implicit differential-algebraic plant model, exposing exact parameter sensitivities. The twin drives an AD-Hessian incremental 4D-Var estimator, benchmarked against ensemble, unscented, and finite-difference variational baselines over a two-by-two matrix that crosses steady with transient excitation and full with partial observation. No single estimator wins everywhere: the unscented filter keeps its best-linear-unbiased advantage on the controlled steady-state corner, while the proposed estimator attains the lowest mean error on the reflector coefficient on the other three corners --- reaching \SI{0.43}{\percent} under transient full observation, roughly an order of magnitude below the unscented filter, and matching the ensemble filter at low-to-moderate noise on the combined transient-partial corner. Every estimator's variance sits within a small factor of the Cram\'er--Rao bound, so the residual error reflects a deterministic bias floor from the twin's differentiability simplifications rather than statistical inefficiency, and the advantage is one of robustness to the resulting multi-modal loss landscape, which a component ablation localises by regime. Differentiating a first-principles plant model thus makes gradient-based inversion competitive with established filters across a reactor's operating range.