PLEIADES: A numerical framework dedicated to the multiphysics and multiscale nuclear fuel behavior simulation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce the PLEIADES framework offering a set of services and numerical tools to model and simulate the behavior of nuclear fuels of different concepts of reactors. The framework provides in particular the following features: interfaces to manipulate meshes and fields, services to deal with different physical solvers, setup of coupling trees to realize multiphysics partitioned (accelerated) fixed point couplings, automated time-marching algorithm, checkpoint/restart strategies, capability to realize on-the-fly multiscale couplings. It is built with a permanent concern for sustainability, scalability and maintainability. PLEIADES framework supports multidimensional simulations, typically 1D, 2D and 3D, possibly multilayered. To date, this framework relies on the generic thermomechanical finite elements solver Cast3M to deal with partial derivative problems (mechanical, thermal or diffusion problems) at the scale of the structure or the (heterogeneous) microstructure. It also makes use of so-called point models (mainly based on ODE — ordinary differential equations) to describe the local (mesoscale) evolution of the material through the physics of irradiation. Several software applications are built on the PLEIADES framework, they can use its parallel features to use multiple processors. The multilayered calculation scheme provides a way to loosen the computations and access to a good parallel performance up to hundred cores. It is also possible to achieve efficient scalable concurrent multiscale simulations through finite element square (FE2) computational homogenization algorithms.