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At least 397 records · Page 22

Microreactor Optimization Using Simulation And Economics (mouse)

Microreactor Optimization Using Simulation and Economics (MOUSE) is a tool that integrates both nuclear microreactor design and reactor economics to provide comprehensive evaluations and optimizations. This tool enables stakeholders to explore the interplay between technical and economic variables, guiding them towards effective and competitive microreactor solutions. For the reactor core simulations, MOUSE leverages the OpenMC Monte Carlo Particle Transport Code to perform detailed core simulations for various microreactor designs. The included OpenMC models are 2D core designs of a Liquid Metal Thermal Microreactor (LMTR), a Gas-Cooled TRISO-Fueled Microreactor (GCMR), and a Heat Pipe Microreactor. Beyond core design, MOUSE includes simplified calculations for: - Calculating the masses of heat exchangers within the system. - Mechanical power of pumps. - Estimating the area occupied by various buildings within the nuclear plant. For the economic analysis, MOUSE provides detailed bottom-up cost estimates, encompassing a wide range of costs including preconstruction costs, direct costs, indirect costs, training costs, financial costs, operation & maintenance (O&M) costs, and fuel costs. These cost estimations are developed using data from the MARVEL project and additional literature sources, enabling the calculation of total capital costs and levelized cost of energy for both first-of-a-kind and nth-of-a-kind microreactors. MOUSE also enables analysis of the cost drivers and competitiveness in the electricity market. MOUSE allows users to modify a wide array of technical and economic parameters to evaluate different scenarios and their impacts. Examples of these parameters include: Fuels, coolants, or reflector materials Enrichment levels Control drum materials and geometry Fuel pin geometry and materials Moderator pin geometry and materials Reactor core and reflector dimensions Packing factor for the TRISO particles Nuclear reactor power and reactor burnup Number of sensors Shielding thickness Reactor vessel and guard vessel dimensions Operational staff requirements Number of emergency shutdowns Levelization period Interest rate Construction duration Since MOUSE is powered by the WATTS toolkit, it supports optimization studies, parametric analyses, and uncertainty calculations/propagation. The optimization techniques enable users to identify optimal design and economic configurations. The parametric analysis tools allow users to explore the sensitivity of various parameters, while uncertainty propagation helps quantify the impact of uncertainties on overall performance and cost. User Interface and Workflow: Currently, MOUSE is a command-line-based tool. Users can input various reactor design or economic parameters, modify the designs, run simulations, and visualize results through comprehensive data visualization and reporting capabilities. The typical workflow involves setting up the reactor model, defining economic parameters, running simulations, and analyzing the results to make informed decisions. By combining advanced design calculations with detailed economic modeling, MOUSE provides a robust framework for optimizing nuclear microreactor technologies, enhancing their competitiveness, and guiding stakeholders towards innovative and cost-effective solutions.

Hanna, Botros [Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Id↗

Health Analysis and Research for Public Events (HARPE) Tool (Final CRADA Report)

Based on its experience in building assessment tools, Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) has demonstrated expertise in developing comparative methodologies and question sets that provide both a physical and cyber-based risk assessment for the commercial facilities sector. A high-level risk assessment tool can be beneficial for venues and organizations that fall under a wide array of facility characterizations, ultimately accommodating the evolving landscape of threats specific to these facilities. The Health Analysis and Research for Public Events (HARPE) Tool is an assessment that seeks to help facility managers assess and mitigate aspects of safety, security, and emergency management within their venues. With the pandemic featuring prominently in today’s landscape, we have adapted and extended the scope of the HARPE tool so that it offers users the ability to integrate assessments of their preparation for, response to, and recovery from threats faced at the venue arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditional threats and hazards remain prevalent in today’s landscape, and the best defense is a proactive approach to preventing and mitigating these threats. At the very core of prevention and mitigation is the first step of conducting a risk assessment—this is the gap that HARPE fills. While it is obvious that the response to COVID-19 is health and sanitation driven, leaders within the commercial facilities sector must also know where to best extend their efforts in mitigating future threats arising from the pandemic. Public events and mass gatherings are directly impacted by COVID-19; however, with the help of HARPE, leaders can focus their attention on core impact areas related to the safety and security of returning to a new normal, as they assess their risks using the Argonne-developed tool. HARPE provides an important solution to the COVID-19 situation by assisting venue managers and health officials in identifying their risks.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

MOOSE Reactor Module: An Open-Source Capability for Meshing Nuclear Reactor Geometries

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program has developed numerous physics solvers utilizing the open-source Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework for multiphysics reactor analysis. These solvers require input finite element meshes representing the discretized spatial domain. Typically, reactor analysts turn to licensed tools for the creation of reactor geometry meshes. Recently, open-source functionality has been added to the MOOSE framework to mesh common reactor geometries and improve MOOSE-based nuclear reactor application user workflows. The new functionality is primarily contained in the new Reactor module of MOOSE and includes support for hexagonal pins, assemblies, and cores, extended Cartesian geometry support, options for modeling static and rotating control drums within a hexagonal assembly, core periphery triangulation, and automatic tagging of pin, assembly, plane, and depletion regions for easier post processing of physics results. A set of reactor geometry mesh builder objects further streamlines the construction of hexagonal and Cartesian cores and allows mapping of materials to regions during mesh generation. The meshes produced with the MOOSE Reactor module may be used directly within MOOSE-based applications or exported as Exodus II files for use in other finite element solvers. The tools have been demonstrated and verified using a variety of NEAMS physics solvers on a range of reactor applications, including a sodium-cooled fast reactor core analysis using Griffin, a fast reactor assembly thermal deformation analysis using MOOSE Tensor Mechanics, and a heat pipe–cooled microreactor coupled analysis using Griffin, Bison, and Sockeye. MOOSE’s Reactor module provides significant advantages compared to the use of external meshing tools when analyzing Cartesian and hexagonal reactor lattices using MOOSE-based applications: immediate accessibility (open-source) to the end user, low barrier to entry for new users, speed of mesh generation, volume preservation of meshed fuel pins, and simplification of analysis workflow when used in conjunction with MOOSE-based applications.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Surface sensitive photoemission EXAFS: A new structural tool

A new technique for surface EXAFS has been developed. In this technique the absorption fine structure is observed by monitoring the photoelectrons emitted from core levels as a function of photon energy. The surface sensitivity is achieved by detecting elastic photoelectrons that escape to the vacuum from a few atomic layers near the surface. EXAFS from Mn 3p and F2s outer core levels in MnF2 were measured, the results were compared with transmission EXAFS from Mn ls core level and good agreement was found. This development is significant because: (1) almost all elements have suitable core levels of low binding energy; (2) since photopeaks from adjacent core levels do not cross as the photon energy is varied, the limitations imposed on other surface EXAFS techniques by this interference is removed. Auger electrons, which have fixed kinetic energies and so can cross photopeaks, will generally have low energies if they originate from outer core levels and be unlikely to appear in the EXAFS region of kinetic energies, i.e., in excess of about 50 eV; (3) VUV light is used, which greatly extends the usable range of photon energies; (4) more than one element in a solid may be studied with the same monochromator. The experiments were carried out on the VUV beam line U14A at NSLS.

Choudhary, K. M.↗

The Kokkos Ecosystem [Brief]

In 2016/2017, the field of High-Performance Computing (HPC) entered a new era driven by fundamental physics challenges to produce ever more energy and cost-efficient processors. Since the convergence on the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) standard in the mid-1990s, application developers enjoyed a seemingly static view of the underlying machine — that of a distributed collection of homogeneous nodes executing in collaboration. However, after almost two decades of dominance, the sole use of MPI to derive parallelism acted as a limiter to improved future performance. While MPI is widely expected to continue to function as the basic mechanism for communication between compute nodes for the immediate future, additional parallelism is required on the computing node itself if high performance and efficiency goals are to be realized. When reviewing the architectures of the top HPC systems today, the change in paradigm is clear: the compute nodes of the leading machines in the world are either powered by many-core chips with a few dozen cores each, or use heterogeneous designs, where traditional CPUs marshal work to massively parallel compute accelerators which has as many as 200,000 processing threads in flight simultaneously. Complicating matters further for application developers, each processor vendor has its own preferred way of writing code for their architecture.The Kokkos EcoSystem was released by Sandia in 2017 to address this new era in HPC system design by providing a vendor independent performance portable programming system for scientific, engineering, and mathematical software applications written in the C++ programming language. Using Kokkos, application developers can be more productive because they will not have to create and maintain separate versions of their software for each architecture, nor will they have to be experts in each architecture's peculiar requirements. Instead, they will have a single method of programming for the diverse set of modern HPC architectures. While Kokkos started in 2011 as a programming model only, it soon became clear that complex applications needed more. It is also critical to have a portable mathematical functions and developers need tools to debug their applications, gain insight into the performance characteristics of their codes and tune algorithm performance parameters through automated processes. The Kokkos EcoSystem addresses those needs through its three main components: the Kokkos Core programming model, the Kokkos Kernels math library, and the Kokkos Tools project.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Short-term hot-hardness characteristics of five case hardened steels

Short-term hot-hardness studies were performed with carburized and hardened AISI 8620, CBS 1000, CBS 1000M, CBS 600, and Vasco X-2 steels. Case and core hardness measurements were made at temperatures from 294 to 811 K (70 to 1000 F). The data were compared with data for high-speed tool steels and AISI 52100. The materials tested can be ranked as follows in order of decreasing hot-hardness retention: (1) Vasco X-2; equivalent to through-hardened tool steels up to 644 K (700 F) above which Vasco X-2 is inferior; (2) CBS 1000, (3) CBS 1000M; (4) CBS 6000; better hardness retention at elevated temperatures than through-hardened AISI 52100; and (5) AISI 8620. For the carburized steels, the change in hardness with temperature of the case and core are similar for a given material. The short-term hot hardness of these materials can be predicted with + or - 1 point Rockwell C.

Anderson, N. E.↗

X-ray absorption spectra of f-element complexes: insight from relativistic multiconfigurational wavefunction theory

X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy, coupled with ab initio calculations, has emerged as the state-of-the-art tool for elucidating the metal-ligand bonding in f-element complexes. Furthermore, this highlight presents recent efforts in calculating XANES spectra of lanthanide and actinide compounds with relativistic multiconfiguration wavefunction approaches that account for differences in donation bonding in the ground state (GS) versus a core-excited state (ES), multiplet effects, and spin-orbit-coupling. With the GS and ES wavefunctions available, including spin-orbit effects, an arsenal of chemical bonding tools that are popular among chemists can be applied to rationalize the observed intensities in terms of covalent bonding.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Core-to-core X-ray emission spectra from Wannier based multiplet ligand field theory

Recent advances using Density Functional Theory (DFT) to augment Multiplet Ligand Field Theory (MLFT) have led to ab-initio calculations of many formerly empirical parameters. This development makes MLFT more predictive instead of interpretive, thus improving its value for studies of highly correlated 3 d , 4 d , and ƒ-electron systems. Synchrotron time is always at a premium, and tools that provide predictive capabilities have clear value when it comes to planning studies. Here, in this work, we develop a DFT + MLFT based approach for core-to-core Kα x-ray emission spectra (XES) and evaluate its performance for a range of transition metal systems. We find good agreement between theory and experiment, as well as the ability to capture key spectral trends related to spin and oxidation state. We also discuss limitations of the model in the context of the remaining free parameters and suggest directions forward.

Ab initio theoretical treatment↗

Adding Assurance to Automatically Generated Code

Code to estimate position and attitude of a spacecraft or aircraft belongs to the most safety-critical parts of flight software. The complex underlying mathematics and abundance of design details make it error-prone and reliable implementations costly. AutoFilter is a program synthesis tool for the automatic generation of state estimation code from compact specifications. It can automatically produce additional safety certificates which formally guarantee that each generated program individually satisfies a set of important safety policies. These safety policies (e.g.. array-bounds, variable initialization) form a core of properties which are essential for high-assurance software. Here we describe the AutoFilter system and its certificate generator and compare our approach to the static analysis tool PolySpace.

Denney, Ewen↗

Impact of Time-Dependent Reactor and Sensor Physics on Core Power Synthesis (Rev.1)

Online synthesis of power distribution is critical in the operation and control of nuclear power reactors to ensure that the core is operating within safety margins and to provide essential knowledge associated with the burnup of the fuel. In light-water reactors, power synthesis is achieved by using some a priori knowledge of the state of the reactor core and updating based on the signals coming from in-core sensors—namely, self-powered neutron detectors (SPNDs). This report examines the effects of fuel burnup and sensor degradation on the ability to accurately synthesize the power distribution in a pressurized water reactor (PWR), considering the typical low-enriched uranium (LEU, 3%-5% enrichment) fuel cycle as well as the higher enrichment LEU+ (5%-8% enrichment) fuel cycle. Several modeling tools were used to simulate power synthesis based on the responses of SPNDs, with emitters made out of Rh or V. A representative PWR LEU core was modeled using the Polaris/Purdue Advanced Reactor Core Simulator (PARCS) approach. The Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport 6 (MCNP6) code was used as well to calculate response functions between different segments of fuel to individual SPNDs; this is a crucial parameter for power synthesis. The Oak Ridge Isotope GENeration (ORIGEN) package in the Standardized Computer Analyses for Licensing Evaluation (SCALE) code was used to model the time-dependent isotopic transmutation in the SPND emitters. All these data were fed into a custom code that enacted the point-based iterative method to simulate power synthesis. Developmental work was also performed on high-fidelity SPND models in the GEometry ANd Tracking 4 (Geant4) code, which enables higher-accuracy modeling of the current responses from SPNDs. In this work, five sets of time-dependent power synthesis test cases were conducted. In these test cases, systematic changes in the input conditions enabled an analysis of the effect of (1) slightly inaccurate a priori power distribution assumptions with respect to fuel burnup, (2) highly inaccurate a priori power distribution assumptions with respect to fuel burnup (such that burnup is not included in the a priori assumed distribution), and (3) differences between Rh and V SPNDs in terms of downstream consequences of the transmutation in the emitters and the extended nature of the LEU+ fuel cycle in comparison with LEU. The authors discovered that one may permissibly have slightly inaccurate a priori assumptions of the fuel burnup (such that the level of burnup may be slightly underapproximated or overapproximated by the accumulated burnup in approximately 9.3 full power days), but to not account for burnup at all in the a priori assumptions leads to severe levels of error, approaching 25% at maximum (for LEU). The authors also discovered that V SPNDs are extraordinarily robust in both the LEU and LEU+ fuel cycles considered in this modeling work, whereas Rh SPNDs undergo significant transmutation that can result in large errors in the synthesized power distribution.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Beyond the Surface: Non-Invasive Low-Field NMR Analysis of Microbially-Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation in Shale Fractures

Microbially-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) is a biological process in which microbially-produced urease enzymes convert urea and calcium into solid calcium carbonate (CaCO 3 ) deposits. MICP has been demonstrated to reduce permeability in shale fractures under elevated pressures, raising the possibility of applying this technology to enhance shale reservoir storage safety. For this and other applications to become a reality, non-invasive tools are needed to determine how effectively MICP seals shale fractures at subsurface temperatures. In this study, two different MICP strategies were tested on 2.54 cm diameter and 5.08 cm long shale cores with a single fracture at 60 °C. Flow-through, pulsed-flow MICP-treatment was repeatedly applied to Marcellus shale fractures with and without sand (“proppant”) until reaching approximately four orders of magnitude reduction in apparent permeability, while a single application of polymer-based “immersion” MICP-treatment was applied to an Eagle Ford shale fracture with proppant. Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance (LF-NMR) and X-Ray computed microtomography (micro-CT) techniques were used to assess the degree of biomineralization. With the flow-through approach, these tools revealed that while CaCO 3 precipitation occurred throughout the fracture, there was preferential precipitation around proppant. Without proppant, the same approach led to premature sealing at the inlet side of the core. In contrast, immersion MICP-treatment sealed off the fracture edges and showed less mineral precipitation overall. This study highlights the use of LF-NMR relaxometry in characterizing fracture sealing and can help guide NMR logging tools in subsurface remediation efforts.

MICP↗

Design, Manufacture and Test of Cryotank Components

On the composite cryotank technology development (CCTD) project, the Boeing Company built two cryotanks as a means of advancing technology and manufacturing readiness levels (TRL and MRL) and lowering the risk of fabricating full-scale fuel containment vessels.1 CCTD focused on upper stage extended duration applications where long term storage of propellants is required. The project involved the design, analysis, fabrication, and test of manufacturing demonstration units (MDU), a 2.4 m (precursor) and a 5.5 m composite cryotank. Key design features included one-piece wall construction to minimize overall weight (eliminating the need for a bellyband joint), 3-dimensionally (3D) reinforced y-joint material to alleviate stress concentrations at the tank to skirt interface and a purge-able fluted core skirt to carry high axial launch loads. The tanks were made with OoA curing pre-impregnated (prepreg) carbon/epoxy (C/E) slit-tape tow (STT) that contained thin micro-crack resistant plies in the tank wall center to impede permeation. The tanks were fabricated at Boeing's Seattle-based Advanced Development Center (ADC) using RAFP and multipiece break-down tooling. The tooling was designed and built by Janicki Industries (JI) at Sedro Woolley, Washington. Tank assemblage consisted of co-bonded dome covers, one-piece fluted core skirts and mechanical fastened cover/sump. Ultrasonic inspection was performed after every cure or bond and a structural health monitoring system (SHMS) was installed to identify potential impact damage events (in-process and/or during transportation). The tanks were low temperature tested at NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. The testing, which consisted of a sequence of fill/drain pressure and thermal cycles using LH2, was successfully concluded in 2012 on the 2.4 m tank and in 2014 on the 5.5 m tank. Structural, thermal, and permeation performance data was obtained. 2 Critical design features and manufacturing advancements, which helped to validate 25% weight and 30% cost reduction projections, were matured. These advancements will help to guide future composite tank integration activities on next generation long duration aircraft and space launch vehicles. Because CCTD addressed innovative design features, heavy lift size scale-up, multipiece captured tooling, new generation automated material placement (AMP) equipment and OoA materials, this chapter should be of interest to educators, students and manufacturers of composite hardware and flight vehicles.

McCarville, Douglas A.↗

Automated Fluid Feature Extraction from Transient Simulations

In the past, feature extraction and identification were interesting concepts, but not required to understand the underlying physics of a steady flow field. This is because the results of the more traditional tools like iso-surfaces, cuts and streamlines were more interactive and easily abstracted so they could be represented to the investigator. These tools worked and properly conveyed the collected information at the expense of much interaction. For unsteady flow-fields, the investigator does not have the luxury of spending time scanning only one "snap-shot" of the simulation. Automated assistance is required in pointing out areas of potential interest contained within the flow. This must not require a heavy compute burden (the visualization should not significantly slow down the solution procedure for co-processing environments like pV3). And methods must be developed to abstract the feature and display it in a manner that physically makes sense. The following is a list of the important physical phenomena found in transient (and steady-state) fluid flow: (1) Shocks, (2) Vortex cores, (3) Regions of recirculation, (4) Boundary layers, (5) Wakes. Three papers and an initial specification for the (The Fluid eXtraction tool kit) FX Programmer's guide were included. The papers, submitted to the AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, are entitled : (1) Using Residence Time for the Extraction of Recirculation Regions, (2) Shock Detection from Computational Fluid Dynamics results and (3) On the Velocity Gradient Tensor and Fluid Feature Extraction.

Haimes, Robert↗

Validation of NSFsim as a Grad-Shafranov equilibrium solver at DIII-D

Plasma shape is a significant factor that must be considered for any Fusion Pilot Plant (FPP) as it has significant consequences for plasma stability and core confinement. A new simulator, NSFsim, has been developed based on a historically successful code, DINA [1], offering tools to simulate both transport and plasma shape. Specifically, NSFsim is a free boundary equilibrium and transport solver and has been configured to match the properties of the DIII-D tokamak. This paper is focused on validating the Grad-Shafranov (GS) solver of NSFsim by analyzing its ability to recreate the plasma shape, the poloidal flux distribution, and the measurements of the simulated diagnostic signals originating from flux loops and magnetic probes in DIII-D. Five different plasma shapes are simulated to show the robustness of NSFsim to different plasma conditions; these shapes are Lower Single Null (LSN), Upper Single Null (USN), Double Null (DN), Inner Wall Limited (IWL), and Negative Triangularity (NT). The NSFsim results are compared against real measured signals, magnetic profile fits from EFIT [2], and another plasma equilibrium simulator, GSevolve [3]. EFIT reconstructions of shots are readily available at DIII-D, but GSevolve was manually ran by us to provide simulation data to compare against.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Decay Dose Shielding Analysis with Hybrid Unstructured Mesh/Constructive Solid Geometry Monte Carlo Calculation and ADVANTG Acceleration

Here, the target segments of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Second Target Station (STS) neutron production facility become highly activated due to spallation reactions or nuclei transmutation by primary protons and emitted neutrons. Once the target segments are removed from their location within the core vessel, decay dose rates must be accurately quantified to determine the shielding configurations of remote-handling tools and transport casks and to aid in planning maintenance activities. For this analysis, we utilized a hybrid unstructured mesh (UM)/constructive solid geometry approach for calculating spallation products and neutron fluxes, activation calculations using the AARE package that includes the CINDER2008 activation code to calculate the decay photon source at different cooling times, and the ADVANTG code to accelerate the final decay photon transport calculation. Both Type 316 stainless steel (SS-316) and lead were investigated as candidates for shielding materials. The decay photon transport calculation through the thick SS-316 or lead shields exhibited between 25 and 30 orders-of-magnitude attenuations in the radial direction, depending on the shield. Such a difficult shielding calculation required advanced variance reduction. ADVANTG has some missing features, which limits its usability in spallation neutron source applications. It does not support volumetric sources created for MCNP6.2 UM capability. An approximate source was created for this problem. Not only was this approximate source needed for running the ADVANTG calculation to generate the weight windows, but also it was essential to develop source biasing (SB) parameters that were crucial for dramatically accelerating the decay photon transport in this problem. With this approximate source, the analysis was completed in a very reasonable computational time, and the design of the STS remote-handling equipment was finalized. This paper compares the efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations with different weight window and SB parameters calculated using different approximate ADVANTG calculations.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Precise mapping of new group I introns in tRNA genes

Bacterial tRNA have been found interrupted at various positions in the anticodon loop by group I introns, in four types. The primary bioinformatic tool for group I intron discovery is a covariance model that can identify conserved features in the catalytic core and can sometimes identify the typical uridine residue at the -1 position, preceding the 5-prime splice site, but cannot identify the typical guanidine residue at the omega position, preceding the 3-prime splice site, to achieve precise mapping. One approach to complete the automation of group I intron mapping is to focus instead on the exons, which is enabled by the regularity of tRNAs. We develop a software module, within a larger package (tFind) aimed at mapping bacterial tRNA and tmRNA genes precisely, that expands this list of four known classes of intron-interrupted tRNAs to 21 cases. A new covariance model for these introns is presented. The wobble base pair formed by the -1 uridine is considered a determinant of the 5-prime splice site, yet one reasonably large new type bears a cytidine nucleotide at that position.

Williams, Kelly P.↗

Manufacture of large, lightweight parabolic antennas

Antenna was produced in segments. Parabole sections were built up as aluminum foil sandwich with core bonded by film adhesive; whole structure was oven-cured after assembly. Structure was assembled with special tool for splice-bonding segments into complete dish, and inflatable bladder to apply pressure at joints during cure.

Hooper, S. W.↗