Enabling the broader use of MOOSE for nuclear energy and other simulation

The department of energy’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program has developed a next generation, open-source framework for simulation. Dozens of applications have been built on this framework and are used by researchers across the globe to drive innovative, safe nuclear energy designs. However, these applications are not yet broadly used by engineering teams outside of the research groups. This SBIR proposal will significantly improve the accessibility of this open-source framework by radically improving the product testing and development workflow. Specifically, this project will allow users to use a computer-aided design model directly in simulation. Today, significant manual labor is devoted to cleaning, defeaturing, decomposing, and meshing computer-aided design data to make it suitable for simulation. In some cases, this can make up over 80% of the overall simulation time for non-linear structural dynamic simulations and requires a great deal of experience and expertise. In the nuclear energy industry, this is a growing bottleneck as next-generation small modular reactors get closer to production and are subject to ever-increasing levels of safety scrutiny. Beyond being a time-sink, this tedious meshing step is widely dreaded by practitioners because it yields no engineering insight or business value, and is a barrier for inexperienced or occasional users of simulation tools. Coreform is addressing this issue by adding the ability to run finite element analysis directly on computer-aided design models to the open-source framework. This innovation will allow engineers to eliminate the manual cleaning and meshing step while maintaining high accuracy per degree of freedom. This simplified workflow will also permit use of the open-source framework by engineers and researchers who lack expertise in data cleaning and meshing. During Phase I and Phase II, we completed various smaller tasks to improve the accessibility of the open-source framework to non-expert users. We also interviewed over fifty members of the nuclear ecosystem and potential users, supported through the DOE iCorps program. We learned that focusing our efforts on enabling simulation directly on computer-aided design models would have the greatest impact on improving accessibility. We made a significant breakthrough that will enable this to happen in the open-source framework. During Phase IIA, we will continue to develop the technology we created in Phase II. We will focus our efforts on the workflow to run simulations on CAD, called isogeometric analysis, in the open-source framework. We will focus on improved performance, robustness, and efficiency. We will work closely with industry partners and a national lab to ensure the workflow we are creating is fit for purpose. This work will dramatically increase the accessibility of government-funded nuclear simulation codes. It will enable nuclear companies to accelerate their time to market for safe nuclear reactors, and improve their ability to simulate detailed, fully 3D models with more reliable quality assurance. Similar benefits will be seen in other industries where computer simulation is impeded by the demands of meshing, including automotive, defense, and aerospace.