Realising the Commercial Potential of the Multi-Physics and Multi-Scale FETCH Technology for Nuclear Safety Applications

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This project will deliver, as a commercial product, a novel multi-physics computational model FETCH. FETCH is used primarily for the design and safety analysis of nuclear systems. It is a coupled radiation transport and fluid dynamics numerical model developed by the Applied Modelling and Computation Group at Imperial College with the support of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The current version of the code has been commercially used in a range of applications including: safety assessments; design of nuclear reactors; and criticality safety evaluation in nuclear fuel processing. However, it has had little uptake because of the lack of user-friendliness and documentation. The commercial potential of this project arises from the following:a) model flexibility and usability - the model was originally designed to be highly general and this has became a paradigm in the group's overall approach to software engineering driven code development; b) our code pre-releases have been used by industry in short and medium-term research contracts with excellent feedback from them which provides confidence in our novel and flexible model e.g., able to deal with complex geometries and highly computational demanding problems; c) a current lack of analogous, high-quality software in the market able to deal with very demanding types of multi-physics problems common in the nuclear industry and d) new industrial-academic avenues for research, design, safety regulations, commissioning and decommissioning of reactors due to the nuclear 'renaissance'. Industrial contacts have identified a suite of benchmarking tests that are required to gain the necessary confidence for a full commercial exploitation of FETCH. Therefore benchmarking will be carried out through a detailed, reproducible comparison between the new release of the code against experimental data, analytical solutions and other commercial codes. Diagnostics tools will be introduced into the FETCH code to improve usability for practitioners. Business development workshops (with existing industrial and academic collaborators) will evaluate these outputs, identify potential marketing strategies and develop a detailed business plan for commercialisation at an international scale.