The hostile irradiation conditions in a tokamak, a fusion energy device, induce changes in the engineering properties of the materials which consequently lead to a degradation of performance for in-vessel components during their lifecycles. Material properties change at different rates as a function of the irradiation dose received and other factors such as temperature. The kind of dose received at a point within the component depends on the attenuation path between the source and location (i.e., distance and the materials between the source and point), temperature (which depends on the geometry, loading conditions and efficiency of the part as a whole), neutron flux, neutron energy, and material cross-sections. This problem is highly non-linear and crosses multiple length-scales making the prediction of how the performance of a part will evolve over its lifecycle extremely challenging.
The methodology used implements a multi-scale numerical model to analyse the influence of neutron irradiation-induced defects on the mechanical behaviour of in-vessel components. The developed workflow integrates open-source software (developed by others) for `Monte-Carlo based neutronics <https://docs.openmc.org/en/stable/>`_, `dislocation dynamics (DD) <https://github.com/giacomo-po/MoDELib>`_ and `finite element analysis (FEA) <https://www.salome-platform.org/>`_ in such a way that gives the flexibility as a general solver to investigate current and novel tokamak components exposed to various irradiation doses and temperature conditions. This work has the potential to transform engineering design for fusion energy by being able to assess a design’s performance across its whole lifecycle.
While this platform has been written for use from the command line, some capabilities have been included to use GUIs offered by the various software for debugging and training.
