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

该项目将作为商业产品提供一种新颖的多物理场计算模型FETCH。FETCH主要用于核系统的设计和安全分析。这是一个耦合辐射传输和流体动力学数值模型，由帝国理工学院的应用建模和计算小组在健康与安全执行局（HSE）的支持下开发。目前版本的准则已在商业上用于一系列应用，包括：安全评估;核反应堆设计;核燃料加工的临界安全评价。然而，由于缺乏用户友好性和文件，该系统很少被采用。该项目的商业潜力来自以下方面：a）模型灵活性和可用性-该模型最初设计为高度通用，这已成为该集团软件工程驱动代码开发的整体方法的典范; B）我们的代码预发布已被行业用于短期和中期研究合同，并获得了他们的良好反馈，这为我们新颖灵活的模型提供了信心，例如，能够处理复杂的几何形状和高计算要求的问题; c）目前市场上缺乏能够处理核工业中常见的非常苛刻类型的多物理问题的类似的高质量软件，以及d）由于核“复兴”，用于研究、设计、安全法规、反应堆的调试和退役的新的工业-学术途径。业界人士已经确定了一套基准测试，这些测试是获得FETCH全面商业开发所需的信心所必需的。因此，将通过新版本代码与实验数据、分析解决方案和其他商业代码之间的详细、可重复的比较来进行基准测试。将在FETCH代码中引入诊断工具，以提高从业人员的可用性。业务发展研讨会（与现有的工业和学术合作者）将评估这些产出，确定潜在的营销策略，并制定详细的商业计划，在国际范围内的商业化。

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.