Automated Hex Meshing for Nuclear Reactor Simulations

The application of numerical analysis is critical to the effective design and safe operation of complex systems such as aircraft, cars and nuclear reactors. Certain types of analysis codes re- quire meshes that are fully comprised of hexahedral elements. Although there have been decades of research on procedures to generate such meshes, there are currently none that can create high quality, fully hexahedral meshes on general geometries without user interaction. This results in a bottleneck in the overall simulation process due to the amount of manual time that must be spent to generate these meshes. This project will focus on fully automated procedures that can generate such meshes without user intervention while still creating good quality meshes over the simulation domain. These will in- teroperate with automated procedures that create special meshes required by certain types of simulations, such as boundary layer meshes for fluid flow problems. They will also integrate with more manual meshing methods so that users can limit their time to the creation tailored meshes in critical areas of the domain for simulations that require that. All of the software will operate through functional interfaces so that it can be easily integrated into advanced simulation workflows and will operate effectively on parallel computers to support large scale simulations. In Phase I a fully functional version of these capabilities will be developed. It will be tested on real word geometries relevant to the design of nuclear reactors as well as other industrial geometries to determine enhancements and new features that will be implemented in Phase II.The project will provide industry, government labs and universities an effective means to take full advantage of existing parallel simulation software. It is only through the development and introduction of these geometry and meshing technologies that industry can broadly integrate high performance parallel simulations into their design processes. High levels of simulation automation and discretization error control will allow design engineers to take full advantage of reliable simulations in the execution of innovative design processes.