Supporting Simulation Families in Nuclear Reactor Workflows

The US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Toolkit has accelerated both the solutions to existing problems and deployment of new designs for current and advanced reactors. Within the toolkit, there exist various families of simulation tools that target specific aspects of a multi-physics simulation for a nuclear reactor. Tools within a specific family vary in both complexity and fidelity as well as the types of resources they require. To complement the NEAMS effort, the Computational Model Builder (CMB) has been designed to provide a graphical user interface to design and execute nuclear reactor workflows.Our proposal focuses on managing simulation families that are used in defining multiphysics workflows for advanced nuclear reactor simulations. The proposed work is well-suited to CMB’s design philosophy, which currently provides tools to describe workflow tasks with user-selectable levels of granularity; in a similar fashion, a task description for a simulation family would pro- vide a core input specification and adaptively present additional information depending on the specific task the user selects within the family. During Phase I, Kitware will develop the following:An intuitive GUI-based workflow infrastructure for CMB that is tailored for the simulation families of tools that exist in the NEAMS Toolkit that can then later be integrated into NEAMS Workbench.A proof of concept on the workflow infrastructure by defining a neutronics simulation based on DIF3D and transitioning it to use Proteus. Visualization of the results of the simulation. Throughout this project, we will be interacting with NEAMS Workbench developers as well as eliciting feedback from end-users and other developers from NEAMS and the nuclear industry, which will guide our efforts. All the software developed in this project will be available under a liberal open-source license.Commercial applications & other benefits: This work will further develop our open-source platform for modeling and simulation workflow. Such a platform provides Kitware with significant business opportunities, as open software platforms lend themselves to a services business model where we can provide technology integration services with customers and collaborators to build valuable, competitive products and services.