Enabling solution verification and efficient, high-accuracy simulations through spline-based adaptivity in MOOSE

The need for reliable, clean energy continues to grow throughout the world, which has driven renewed interest and new innovations in the development of fission-based power generation. As nuclear energy companies design next-generation reactor technology, they are slowed by the lack of accessible and reliable engineering simulation for engineers who are not computational specialists. The company has verified through its own market research the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s assertion that solution-error estimation and adaptivity is key to addressing the accessibility of these tools to non-experts. Such a technology will automate one of the most error-prone and confusing parts of finite element analysis for non-experts. The company is developing fully automatic solver-driven adaptivity based on isogeometric analysis and integrating it with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s leading open-source multi-physics code, which will enable non-expert engineers to achieve verified solutions. In Phase I, the company implemented spline-based adaptivity and released it in their commercial preprocessing software that is heavily used in the nuclear industry. They also demonstrated the accurate results of adaptivity with an isogeometric analsyis solver, and began integrating adaptability with the DOE open-source code. In Phase II, the company will expand the adaptivity algorithms from two dimensions to three dimensions, complete the integration with the DOE code, and implement next-generation approaches to adaptivity to allow for greater efficiency in solving simulations. Three commercial nuclear customers are providing benchmarks and feedback throughout Phase II. The benefits of fully automatic adaptivity include reduced development time and cost, improved designs, better understanding of risk, and quantifiable confidence in analysis results and engineering decisions in the nuclear industry. Broad commercial applications and benefits to other segments of the modeling and simulation industry are also likely. Others face many of the same problems as nuclear energy when it comes to quantifying accuracy, particularly in the areas of automotive, defense, and additive manufacturing. They will experience the same benefits of faster development, better decision-making, and higher confidence through the technology developed in this proposal.