This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

The Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is an
open-source framework developed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to
facilitate solving complex real-world engineering problems. Scientists and
engineers have used MOOSE to create applications for simulating nuclear fuel
performance (BISON), microstructure evolution (MARMOT), material degradation
and aging (GRIZZLY) and other coupled nonlinear phenomenon. The MOOSE
framework provides a significant set of capabilities to applications including
robust solver technology, support for massively parallel execution, modular
code development, extensive documentation, continuous integration and
regression testing as well as user support.

This presentation will provide the background for the development of the MOOSE
framework and an overview of several primary applications. The development of
MOOSE began in 2008 at INL primarily to support nuclear energy modeling
efforts. Since that time numerous MOOSE-based applications in diverse areas
of science and engineering have been created by developers from many different
countries. The release of MOOSE on GitHub in 2014 under the GNU LGPL 2.1
license enabled developers from around the world to more easily contribute to
the software and interact with the MOOSE team.

The BISON nuclear fuel performance code will be used as an example of
leveraging the capabilities of the MOOSE framework and to demonstrate the
benefits obtained. Nuclear fuel experiences a complex set of multiphysics
phenomena during operation in a reactor. These phenomena occur over distances
from nanometers to meters and time scales from microseconds to years. In order
to model the coupled physics involved in this application would normally
require a large software development effort. However, the BISON team utilizes
the basic physics implemented in MOOSE, such as solid mechanics, heat
transfer, mechanical and thermal contact, and thus can focus on
nuclear-specific materials and processes. This highly reduces the development
workload for BISON. In addition, the inherent parallel support provided by
MOOSE allows large simulations to be run efficiently on Linux-based clusters.
A recent BISON model of a missing pellet surface problem will be used to
illustrate these advantages.

Finally, the impact of MOOSE-based tools in industrial applications will be
demonstrated by BISON through the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light
Water Reactors (CASL). CASL was created in 2010 by the US Department of Energy
(DOE) as an innovation hub focused on advancing commercial nuclear power. A
primary goal is the development of a virtual environment to simulate a nuclear
reactor. The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) has been
created and used to accurately simulate the operating history of the Watts Bar
Unit 1 nuclear reactor. VERA was also used to model the startup of Watts Bar
Unit 2 and continues to provide predictions for supporting future refueling
operations.