SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “software development”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,351 records · Page 75

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

DOE OSTI2016

OPENSTUDIO® [SWR-07-40]

OpenStudio® is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) collection of software tools to support whole building energy modeling using EnergyPlus and advanced daylight analysis using Radiance. OpenStudio is an open source (LGPL) project to facilitate community development, extension, and private sector adoption. OpenStudio includes graphical interfaces along with a Software Development Kit (SDK). In addition to the graphical interface, OpenStudio allows building researchers and software developers to quickly get started through its multiple entry levels, including access through C++, Ruby, and C#. Users can leverage the Ruby interface to create OpenStudio Measures that can be easily shared and applied to OpenStudio Models. OPENSTUDIO® IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ALLIANCE FOR SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, LLC, THE MANAGER AND OPERATOR OF THE NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY.

Ball, Brian↗

DOE OSTI2016

Finite-Test-Case Development to Demonstrate Logical Integrity of Software in DRPS

Reactor protection system (RPS) in nuclear power plant (NPP) is in the process of digitalization in response to advanced features of digital systems. In this context, software integrity in the RPS becomes an important issue since it may cause common-cause failure. Therefore, to guarantee the safety of NPPs, the integrity of the software need to be properly demonstrated or assessed. There are three typical approaches for software reliability quantification: software reliability growth model (SRGM), Bayesian belief network (BBN), and test-based method. Basically, SRGM is difficult to apply to the safety-critical software because not only sufficient failure sets are unavailable but consequence of system failure is also unacceptable. Then the result obtained through the BBN model may have large uncertainty, so it produces difficulties in integrity demonstration of safety-critical software. Thus, the BBN result need to be complemented or verified by test-based method. Currently, for the integrity demonstration of safety-critical software, black-box test which feeds inputs and examines just outputs whether they succeeded or failed is considered based on trajectory-form-of-input (a series of successive values for the input variables that occur during the operation of the software over time). Usually these trajectory-inputs are randomly sampled from operational profile. In this approach, however, there are some practical difficulties. Therefore, we proposed a new test method for safety-critical software in digitalized reactor protection system (DRPS). The main contents described in this paper are about basic concepts under development of finite-test-cases by which the integrity of the software logic can be verified. It should be noted that the influence of the environments, such as operating system and other hardware, are not considered since the method focuses on software logic only. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2017

R&D to Market Success: BTO-Supported Technologies Commercialized from 2010-2015

Technology commercialization plays an essential role in almost every facet of the U.S. economy. It spurs private sector funding that supports innovative breakthroughs, drives growth through increased productivity and product development, increases American competitiveness, and creates domestic jobs. The BTO Technology Commercialization report is an annual publication offering the latest information on successfully commercialized technologies resulting in part from BTO’s research partnerships. This report defines a “commercialized technology” as a process, technique, design, machine, tool, material, or software that was developed with funds provided at least in part by BTO, and that has resulted in domestic sales or is in use in the U.S. This definition also applies to open-source software products developed with support from BTO, all of which are currently distributed freely but are actively used for commercial purposes.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2018

A large-scale analysis of bioinformatics code on GitHub

In recent years, the explosion of genomic data and bioinformatic tools has been accompanied by a growing conversation around reproducibility of results and usability of software. However, the actual state of the body of bioinformatics software remains largely unknown. Here, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of source code in the bioinformatics community, specifically looking at relationships between code properties, development activity, developer communities, and software impact. To investigate these issues, we curated a list of 1,720 bioinformatics repositories on GitHub through their mention in peer-reviewed bioinformatics articles. Additionally, we included 23 high-profile repositories identified by their popularity in an online bioinformatics forum. We analyzed repository metadata, source code, development activity, and team dynamics using data made available publicly through the GitHub API, as well as article metadata. We found key relationships within our dataset, including: certain scientific topics are associated with more active code development and higher community interest in the repository; most of the code in the main dataset is written in dynamically typed languages, while most of the code in the high-profile set is statically typed; developer team size is associated with community engagement and high-profile repositories have larger teams; the proportion of female contributors decreases for high-profile repositories and with seniority level in author lists; and, multiple measures of project impact are associated with the simple variable of whether the code was modified at all after paper publication. In addition to providing the first large-scale analysis of bioinformatics code to our knowledge, our work will enable future analysis through publicly available data, code, and methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2013

Deep in Data: Empirical Data Based Software Accuracy Testing Using the Building America Field Data Repository

This paper describes progress toward developing a usable, standardized, empirical data-based software accuracy test suite using home energy consumption and building description data. Empirical data collected from around the United States have been translated into a uniform Home Performance Extensible Markup Language format that may enable software developers to create translators to their input schemes for efficient access to the data. This could allow for modeling many homes expediently, and thus implementing software accuracy test cases by applying the translated data.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2022

Ambassador Project (Final Report)

SEL, in collaboration with its partners, performed research, development and demonstration of a trust, data, and resource management software layer enabling multiple software applications from different suppliers to operate in a Software Defined Infrastructure. The Energy sector has successfully deployed Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology and is rapidly scaling deployments. One major benefit of SDN is the abstracted centralized nature of the orchestration and management of the network. This architecture enables end users to deploy new technology and capabilities as quickly as they perform firmware upgrades to field devices. When an end user needs to roll trucks to install new equipment, they simply deploy new software to run on top of this SD-Infrastructure. This has attracted many software companies to develop value added features and introduce new capabilities, which is all good for the industry but has also introduced new challenges, including how to manage trust between these software applications, how to manage the data integrity and access, and how to manage access to the network resources each of these software applications are demanding. Completion of this project developed and demonstrated a safe and reliable resource scheduler and cybersecurity trust management communication platform allowing multiple software applications to operate in a SD-Infrastructure resulting in the commercialization of a software eco-system and architecture that maintains interoperability, cybersecurity, and reliability where the end user can safely scale out their software to leverage the powerful benefits of SDN.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2026

Lessons Learned from Open-Source Software Training Toward Expanding the Fusion Workforce

Within the United States (U.S.), the Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) Collaboratives seek to accelerate fusion technology development through wide-ranging community-driven research activities that bring together industry, laboratories, research institutes, and academia. Increasing the maturity of key components and systems for future fusion power plants (FPPs) toward commercialization, will, by necessity, increase the need for knowledgeable engineers, designers, and researchers in industry capable of integrating and further improving these technologies within industry FPP concepts. Further, various modeling and simulation packages support these programs and are under-development within them to drive design iteration and the development of FPP digital twins. To derive the greatest benefit from model output and capabilities, training these same specialists will be vital. Thus, the development of effective and accessible software onboarding and professional development opportunities focused on fusion will be key to keeping the pace of growth high in the coming decade and beyond. A similar need exists within the advanced fission reactor community, driven by an ever-growing need for carbon-free baseload power for industrial and data center applications. Within the U.S. and around the world, several open-source packages and frameworks exist to support this endeavor, and two we will highlight here are the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework and OpenMC. These packages, notably, are also being utilized in the FIRE Collaboratives program. In this presentation, we will highlight the lessons learned from over 30 years of combined software development and training experience, focused on developing strong technical software foundations within the nuclear workforce, from students to professional engineers & scientists. We will connect this experience to present and emerging needs in the fusion energy community, and, finally, will outline possible paths forward to develop a large, robust, global fusion workforce.

70 - PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2019

Hammerhead, an ultrahigh resolution ePix camera for wavelength-dispersive spectrometers

Wavelength-dispersive spectrometers (WDS) are often used in synchrotron and FEL applications where high energy resolution (in the order of eV) is important. Increasing WDS energy resolution requires increasing spatial resolution of the detectors in the dispersion direction. The common approaches are not ideal: using strip detectors loses the 2D position sensitivity (important for, e.g., background estimation) and the high counting rate; using pixel detectors with a small pitch results in complex charge sharing behaviour and typically have a small size. Developing pixel detectors with high aspect ratio and a small pitch in the wavelength dispersive direction would be ideal, however, it would require a substantial ASIC development. We present a new approach, with a novel sensor design using rectangular pixels with a high aspect ratio (between strips and pixels, further called “strixels”), and strixel redistribution to match the square pixel arrays of typical ASICs. This results in a sensor area of 17.4 mm × 77 mm, with a fine pitch of 25 µm in the horizontal direction resulting in 3072 columns and 176 rows. The sensors use ePix100 readout ASICs, leveraging their low noise (43 e - , or 180 eV rms). We present results obtained with a Hammerhead ePix100 camera, showing that the small pitch (25 µm) in the dispersion direction maximizes performance for both high and low photon occupancies, resulting in optimal WDS energy resolution. The low noise level at high photon occupancy allows precise photon counting, while at low occupancy, both the energy and the subpixel position can be reconstructed for every photon, allowing an ultrahigh resolution (in the order of 1 µm) in the dispersion direction and rejection of scattered beam and harmonics. Using strixel sensors with redistribution and flip-chip bonding to standard ePix readout ASICs results in ultrahigh position resolution (~1 µm) and low noise in WDS applications, leveraging the advantages of hybrid pixel detectors (high production yield, good availability, relatively inexpensive) while minimizing development complexity through sharing the ASIC, hardware, software and DAQ development with other versions of ePix cameras.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2022

Network Defense Workforce Development System

The software implements the methodology of cybersecurity training architecture and is leveraged to build a turn-key based simulated cyberattack game in which the player assumes the facility manager's role and must defend the OT network from adaptive cyberattacks by directly configuring the physical network environment and implementing security policies.

Gourisetti, Sri Nikhil Gupta↗

DOE OSTI2019

Novel, Low-Cost, Light-Weight High Efficiency (H*10 Capable) Neutron Detector-Dosimeter

The goal of this project was to design, develop and validate a novel, spectroscopy enabled H*(10) neutron dosimetry system based on the tensioned metastable fluid detector (TMFD) sensor technology. The project team consisted of staff from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Purdue University (PU) and Sagamore Adams Laboratories, LLC (SAL). PU-SAL staff were tasked with the design, development, construction and testing of the H*TMFD hardware and software, along with developing the control and data acquisition software for comparison of predictions from H*TMFD against a commonly accepted and widely used industry standard system; for this project, the Li-I detector coupled to bonner spheres (LiI-BSS) system manufactured by Ludlum, Inc. was utilized as the reference (“gold”) standard – similar in terms of neutron spectroscopy enablement to another industry recognized, albeit, significantly higher cost (est. $300K) system referred to as “ROSPEC” (from BTI, Inc., which was not available for this project). ORNL staff were tasked with providing field-relevant guidance, apparatus and facilities for acquiring data against calibrated neutron sources, and comparing results of H*TMFD against LiI-BSS system predictions in a series of blind-tests conducted at ORNL. Over the course of 12 months, the PU-SAL-ORNL staff successfully accomplished the proposed technical and administrative tasks, inclusive of engaging in outreach to potential users of this technology in the DOE-wide infrastructure. The proposed tasks were successfully accomplished in timely manner; the follow-up type tasks pertaining to SBIR type Phases 2-3 were discussed and are initiated, inclusive of filing for intellectual property (IP) disclosures and possible patent filings by PU’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC). Two H*TMFD system architectures (see Exhibits 1 & 2 in the report) were developed and constructed for hand-portability by health-physicists (HPs) – the HP-H*TMFD, and the H*TMFD system which consists of a side-by-side mounted array of 4 TMFDs of 3 different sizes in sensitive volume (including one with borated fluid) that now simultaneously enables neutron energy spectroscopy: single bin for < 0.1 MeV, and 152 energy bins in the 0.1-15.2 MeV range; H*(10) dosimetry from ~5 μRem/h towards 10 R/h ranges. Several experiments were conducted using neutron sources in various configurations (shielded and unshielded). In direct comparison against the LiI-BSS industry standard (acquiring data for 26h each source), the H*TMFD system (acquiring data for ~6h for each source) offered H*(10) dose predictions for the most part accurate to within +/-10% for dose rates in the 100-300 μRem/h range. The LiI-BSS was impractical to use under ultra-low (~10 μRem/h) dose rate space, as also another metering device used at ORNL (Ludlum 4241L non-spectroscopy enabled) for which the lower limit is set by the manufacturer at 100 μRem/h. The enablement for efficient use in timely manner at the 10 μRem/h levels is deemed to be a strong enabling factor for H*TMFD for use in the DOE-nuclear laboratory arena. In terms of weight, the HP-H*TMFD weighs under ~5-7 lb.; the H*TMFD system weighs ~35-lb. As such, it is ~1/4 the weight of an LiI-BSS system weighing ~120 lb (LiI detector with 6 bonner spheres) and, ~1/2 the weight of ROSPEC. As a result of this activity, two involved post-doctoral student staff have now transitioned their knowledge and experiences to DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). A PU graduate student has also benefited from this project work which formed a principal basis for his Ph.D. dissertation work (in progress).

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

DOE OSTI2025

Portable Software Environment for Ultrahigh-Resolution ELM Development on GPUs

This paper presents our endeavors in developing the large-scale, ultra-high-resolution E3SM Land Model (uELM), specifically designed for exascale computers furnished with accelerators such as Nvidia GPUs. The uELM is a sophisticated code that substantially relies on High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments, necessitating particular machine and software configurations. To facilitate community-based uELM developments employing GPUs, we have created a portable, standalone software environment preconfigured with uELM input datasets, simulation cases, and source code. This environment, utilizing Docker, encompasses all essential code, libraries, and system software for uELM development on GPUs. It also features a functional unit test framework and an offline model testbed for comprehensive numerical experiments. From a technical perspective, the paper discusses GPU-ready container generations, uELM code management, and input data distribution across computational platforms. Lastly, the paper demonstrates the use of environment for functional unit testing, end-to-end simulation on CPUs and GPUs, and collaborative code development.

E3SM Land Model↗

DOE OSTI2023

Visualization Quality Assessment

Understanding how inaccuracies in visualizations affect users’ perception and understanding of scientific data is hard. Inaccuracies in visualizations are quite common and could arise from a range of sources such as errors in the original dataset arising from compression artifacts, errors in the capturing device, noise during transmission of the data, effects due to the algorithm being used to convert data to visualization images, images generated from neural networks, and sources we have yet to discover. Many image quality assessment metrics have been developed to quantify image errors. However, these are usually focused on “natural images” rather than visualizations of scientific data. Common image quality assessment metrics (IQAs) include MSE, PSNR, perceptual metrics such SSIM, FSIM as well as perceptual metrics using deep learning approaches. However, a critical part of understanding how errors are perceived by humans, and subsequently developing more accurate quality assessment metrics, is through user evaluation studies. The goal of this software is to develop a visualization quality assessment (VQA) process that will enable the generation of VQAs that can be used to quantify errors in scientific data visualizations. The VQA development process will include software to support user evaluation experimental design, analysis of visualization differences against standard quality metrics, and the ability to develop additional VQA metrics specific to scientific visualization images.

Grosset, Andre↗

DOE OSTI2016

SU-F-T-169: A Periodic Quality Assurance Program for a Spot-Scanning Proton Treatment Facility

Purpose: To develop daily and monthly quality assurance (QA) programs in support of a new spot-scanning proton treatment facility using a combination of commercial and custom equipment and software. Emphasis was placed on efficiency and evaluation of key quality parameters. Methods: The daily QA program was developed to test output, spot size and position, proton beam energy, and image guidance using the Sun Nuclear Corporation rf-DQA™3 device and Atlas QA software. The program utilizes standard Atlas linear accelerator tests repurposed for proton measurements and a custom jig for indexing the device to the treatment couch. The monthly QA program was designed to test mechanical performance, image quality, radiation quality, isocenter coincidence, and safety features. Many of these tests are similar to linear accelerator QA counterparts, but many require customized test design and equipment. Coincidence of imaging, laser marker, mechanical, and radiation isocenters, for instance, is verified using a custom film-based device devised and manufactured at our facility. Proton spot size and position as a function of energy are verified using a custom spot pattern incident on film and analysis software developed in-house. More details concerning the equipment and software developed for monthly QA are included in the supporting document. Thresholds for daily and monthly tests were established via perturbation analysis, early experience, and/or proton system specifications and associated acceptance test results. Results: The periodic QA program described here has been in effect for approximately 9 months and has proven efficient and sensitive to sub-clinical variations in treatment delivery characteristics. Conclusion: Tools and professional guidelines for periodic proton system QA are not as well developed as their photon and electron counterparts. The program described here efficiently evaluates key quality parameters and, while specific to the needs of our facility, could be readily adapted to other proton centers.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2015

TU-AB-303-08: GPU-Based Software Platform for Efficient Image-Guided Adaptive Radiation Therapy

Purpose: In this study, we develop an integrated software platform for adaptive radiation therapy (ART) that combines fast and accurate image registration, segmentation, and dose computation/accumulation methods. Methods: The proposed system consists of three key components; 1) deformable image registration (DIR), 2) automatic segmentation, and 3) dose computation/accumulation. The computationally intensive modules including DIR and dose computation have been implemented on a graphics processing unit (GPU). All required patient-specific data including the planning CT (pCT) with contours, daily cone-beam CTs, and treatment plan are automatically queried and retrieved from their own databases. To improve the accuracy of DIR between pCT and CBCTs, we use the double force demons DIR algorithm in combination with iterative CBCT intensity correction by local intensity histogram matching. Segmentation of daily CBCT is then obtained by propagating contours from the pCT. Daily dose delivered to the patient is computed on the registered pCT by a GPU-accelerated superposition/convolution algorithm. Finally, computed daily doses are accumulated to show the total delivered dose to date. Results: Since the accuracy of DIR critically affects the quality of the other processes, we first evaluated our DIR method on eight head-and-neck cancer cases and compared its performance. Normalized mutual-information (NMI) and normalized cross-correlation (NCC) computed as similarity measures, and our method produced overall NMI of 0.663 and NCC of 0.987, outperforming conventional methods by 3.8% and 1.9%, respectively. Experimental results show that our registration method is more consistent and roust than existing algorithms, and also computationally efficient. Computation time at each fraction took around one minute (30–50 seconds for registration and 15–25 seconds for dose computation). Conclusion: We developed an integrated GPU-accelerated software platform that enables accurate and efficient DIR, auto-segmentation, and dose computation, thus supporting an efficient ART workflow. This work was supported by NIH/NCI under grant R42CA137886.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2024

Improving and Automating Building Model Data Exchange

There are many instances throughout a project’s lifecycle where there arises a need for quick and accurate risk assessment of building designs. For example, an unexpected design change during construction may necessitate structural engineers to perform a seismic risk assessment on analytical models of the updated building design using high fidelity structural analysis software, such as ANSYS or Abaqus. However, the efficiency of such workflows often depends upon the interoperability of architectural design software and structural analysis software. When the quality of this interoperability is lacking or even non-existent, the efficiency of virtual engineering workflows is hampered, which increases project costs. A McGraw Hill industry survey of professional users of Building Information Modeling (BIM) technologies found that there is high demand for BIM interoperability for structural analysis, but that the value/difficulty ratio is currently too low for practical use. There have been efforts by the academic community to facilitate model data exchange between the architectural design and structural analysis domains, but such solutions have not been widely adopted by industry, face technical challenges, and oftentimes are limited in applicability for users of various BIM software. Therefore, INL is developing capabilities to improve, automate, and generalize model data exchange between architectural BIM software (e.g., Revit) and structural analysis software (e.g., SAP2000, ANSYS). The goal is to help expedite and automate as much of the pre-processing step for creating analytical models in finite element analysis software as reasonably as possible. Such a "BIM-to-FEA" conversion tool should provide direct benefit to end-users through accuracy, automation, quick turn-around, and wide applicability. To generalize the application of this BIM-to-FEA conversion tool and increase its useability among the many different commercial BIM software currently used by industry, the program is being developed with the concept of openBIM. OpenBIM is the application of non-proprietary, open data standards that allow for BIM model data exchange in a format that is accessible, retainable, and useable for all users. The most widely used open, non-proprietary data exchange format for BIM is the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema. IFC is developed by buildingSMART international and is ISO certified (ISO 16739-1:2018). The BIM-to-FEA conversion tool is being developed for compatibility with typical commercial building designs of steel framed structures. The tool is currently capable of importing architectural BIM data of framed building structures, recognizing and extracting the aspects of the model that are required for structural analysis, adjusting the connectivity of frame members, and finally exporting to an analytical model stored in the IFC format. The exported IFC analytical model can then be imported into various openBIM compliant software, such as SAP2000. Such capabilities have already been tested on commercial software, as shown above, and continue to be improved. Work is underway to test the conversion on various commercial BIM software, develop a user-friendly interface, incorporate the program into the broader DeepLynx data warehouse project being developed by INL, and to eventually open-source the tool for the benefit of the community. Future development of the tool envisions the ability for efficient iterative risk assessment of generative building designs, all within a workflow utilizing open-source tools. One such open-source tool will be MOOSE, an advanced finite element analysis tool developed at INL. The conversion tool will also branch out from typical commercial building designs and will aim to incorporate nuclear construction. The aim will be to convert both structural and non-structural components of nuclear facilities, such as curved concrete containment structures and piping systems, respectively.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2015

SU-E-J-272: Auto-Segmentation of Regions with Differentiating CT Numbers for Treatment Response Assessment

Purpose: It has been reported recently that the change of CT number (CTN) during and after radiation therapy (RT) may be used to assess RT response. The purpose of this work is to develop a tool to automatically segment the regions with differentiating CTN and/or with change of CTN in a series of CTs. Methods: A software tool was developed to identify regions with differentiating CTN using K-mean Cluster of CT numbers and to automatically delineate these regions using convex hull enclosing method. Pre- and Post-RT CT, PET, or MRI images acquired for sample lung and pancreatic cancer cases were used to test the software tool. K-mean cluster of CT numbers within the gross tumor volumes (GTVs) delineated based on PET SUV (standard uptake value of fludeoxyglucose) and/or MRI ADC (apparent diffusion coefficient) map was analyzed. The cluster centers with higher value were considered as active tumor volumes (ATV). The convex hull contours enclosing preset clusters were used to delineate these ATVs with color washed displays. The CTN defined ATVs were compared with the SUV- or ADC-defined ATVs. Results: CTN stability of the CT scanner used to acquire the CTs in this work is less than 1.5 Hounsfield Unit (HU) variation annually. K-mean cluster centers in the GTV have difference of ∼20 HU, much larger than variation due to CTN stability, for the lung cancer cases studied. The dice coefficient between the ATVs delineated based on convex hull enclosure of high CTN centers and the PET defined GTVs based on SUV cutoff value of 2.5 was 90(±5)%. Conclusion: A software tool was developed using K-mean cluster and convex hull contour to automatically segment high CTN regions which may not be identifiable using a simple threshold method. These CTN regions were reasonably overlapped with the PET or MRI defined GTVs.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2021

Research Software Engineering Efforts for DataFlow: FY2021 Developments

DataFlow is a web application that helps scientific data to flow from one source location to another destination location. DataFlow helps scientists easily capture scientific metadata associated with an experiment and transmit both metadata and experimental data to a designated, centralized data storage resource. This report describes the software engineering efforts and architecture of the project for the fiscal year 2021 developments. We hope it effectively communicates findings from our work, challenges we have overcome, and how we will continue our development of DataFlow in the future.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2018

CRADA Final Report: Weld Predictor App

Welding is an important manufacturing process used in a broad range of industries and market sectors, including automotive, aerospace, heavy manufacturing, medical, and defense. During welded fabrication, high localized heat input and subsequent rapid cooling result in the creation of residual stresses and distortion. These residual stresses can significantly affect the fatigue resistance, cracking behavior, and load-carrying capacity of welded structures during service. Further, additional fitting and tacking time is often required to fit distorted subassemblies together, resulting in non-value added cost. Using trial-and-error methods to determine which welding parameters, welding sequences, and fixture designs will most effectively reduce distortion is a time-consuming and expensive process. For complex structures with many welds, this approach can take several months. For this reason, efficient and accurate methods of mitigating distortion are in-demand across all industries where welding is used. Analytical and computational methods and commercial software tools have been developed to predict welding-induced residual stresses and distortion. Welding process parameters, fixtures, and tooling can be optimized to reduce the HAZ softening and minimize weld residual stress and distortion, improving performance and reducing design, fabrication and testing costs. However, weld modeling technology tools are currently accessible only to engineers and designers with a background in finite element analysis (FEA) who work with large manufacturers, research institutes, and universities with access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the US do not typically have the human and computational resources needed to adopt and utilize weld modeling technology. To allow an engineer with no background in FEA and SMEs to gain access to this important design tool, EWI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) developed the online weld application software tool “WeldPredictor” ( https://eweldpredictor.ewi.org ). About 1400 users have tested this application. This project marked the beginning of development on the next version of WeldPredictor that addresses many outstanding features of the original, including 3D models, allow more material hardening laws, model material phase transformation, and uses open source finite element solvers to quickly solve problems (as opposed to expensive commercial tools).

42 ENGINEERING↗