Coreform wins major grant to develop isogeometric analysis for nuclear energy

OREM, UTAH — The Department of Energy has awarded Coreform more than $1 million to pursue IGA

Published: 4 October 2023

Coreform LLC, the highest ranked computer-aided engineering (CAE) company on the Inc. 5000 list, announces its receipt of a competitive grant from the Department of Energy. The grant will fund the development of isogeometric analysis for use with the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE).

The DOE’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program developed MOOSE as an open-source framework for simulation, which is used by researchers across the globe to drive innovative, safe nuclear energy designs. Coreform’s isogeometric analysis technology will significantly improve the accessibility of MOOSE by radically improving the product testing and development workflow. Specifically, this project will allow engineers to use a computer-aided design (CAD) model directly in simulation.

Today, significant manual labor is devoted to cleaning, defeaturing, decomposing, and meshing computer-aided design data to make it suitable for simulation. In some cases, this can make up over 80% of the overall simulation time for non-linear structural dynamic simulations and requires a great deal of experience and expertise. In the nuclear energy industry, this is a growing bottleneck as next-generation small modular reactors get closer to production and are subject to ever-increasing levels of safety scrutiny. Beyond being a time-sink, this tedious meshing step is widely dreaded by practitioners because it yields no engineering insight or business value, and is a barrier for inexperienced or occasional users of simulation tools.

Coreform is addressing this issue by adding the ability to run FEA directly on CAD models in MOOSE. This innovation will allow engineers to eliminate the manual cleaning and meshing step while maintaining high accuracy per degree of freedom.

The work funded by this grant will dramatically increase the accessibility of government-funded nuclear simulation codes and promote the development of safe, clean, nuclear energy.

For more information, contact info@coreform.com.