A study of the advancement of a reactor core design environment

Full text: During the years from 2002 to 2004 a joint project has been performed by IFE, Halden and Yonden Engineering Corporation, Japan, to develop an advanced reactor core design environment based on a communication method for controlling a reactor core code system efficiently from PCs in a distributed network. The advanced reactor core design environment is realized by using Microsoft Visual Basic and communication software based on the IFE product SoftwareBus. The project has been carried out based on the fact that a computer-aided design system has been under development at Yonden Engineering Corporation in order to perform efficiently fuel replacement calculation by Yonden's reactor design code system. In this system, the structure is such that the physics calculation code system runs on UNIX workstations (in parallel) performing the calculations, while the Man-Machine Interface for controlling the calculation programs run on PCs in a distributed network. It has been emphasised to develop a reliable, flexible, adaptable and user-friendly system, which is easy to maintain. Therefore, a rather general communication tool (IFE's SoftwareBus) has been used for realizing communication of the n-pair n-node between the reactor core design code system and the PC applications. Further, a method of improvement in the speed of the optimal pattern calculation has been implemented by assigning each examination pattern to two or more computers distributed in the network and assigning the next pattern calculation to the computer, where the calculation has ended or has the lowest workload. The high-speed technology of the pattern survey by network distributed processing is based on SoftwareBus. The reactor core design code system is developed in FORTRAN running on a UNIX workstation (Solaris). The PC applications have been developed by using Microsoft Visual Basic on Windows 2000 platform. The first step of the verification and validation process was carried out in March 2003 when a preliminary version of the system was installed at the Yonden Engineering Corporation facilities in Takamatsu. A final delivery, installation and acceptance test took place in March 2004 and the system is now in operation. The QA system applied in the software development, verification and validation process of the project has provided a basis for the highly reliable operation of this advanced systems. The QA plan followed in the project is in accordance with common practice for this type of delivery. (Author)