Integrated Multiple Effects Software for Nuclear Physics Applications

Abstract

The technical progress made during this project has been very substantial, and in most ways has exceeded the expectations of what was intended. In particular, the ability to treat CAD-based complex geometry, using the cut-cell finite-difference methodology, has been evolved to a very advanced state. Figure 1 illustrates the progress made, comparing what the modeling was capable of at the end of the Phase I project, to what it is capable of at the end of the Phase II project. This project had a strong component of collaborative research with activities at the TJNAF (JLab), including scientific assessment of specific nuclear physics hardware, and this collaboration was a main focus during the much of the Phase II project. During the final year of this project, and subsequent months since its completion, the Department of Energy has strongly shifted emphasis for SBIR projects towards commercialization. During this same time frame the software used for the modeling, Vorpal, underwent a similarly dramatic shift from a single product with any-and-all-phyiscs-in-one, to a suite of products, under the name Vsim, with each product individually targeted at one of the areas of: Electromagnetics, Microwave Devices, Plasma Devices, and Accelerator Physics. The focus area of this project, thermal analysis, was a new but important type of multi-physics application for the software involved, and the manner in which it has been implemented is of sufficient generality, that it continues life as a fifth target area, Thermal Transport. Thus, while a somewhat more subtle commercial deployment of this project’s developments was the original intention (e.g., more-physics-in-the-one), the result is in fact more in line with the newer emphasis, e.g., a direct and obvious one-to-one commercial product deployment of project capabilities.