Photo of the Week: Assessing Material Behavior in Large-scale, Safety-critical Scenarios

The Department of Energy and industry are leading nuclear reactor development for high-output energy. New reactor designs could expose materials to extreme operating conditions - radiation, high temperature, corrosion. Understanding metal behavior under extreme conditions is essential to determine adequate safety margins.

Evaluation methods based on observed data and experiments are inadequate for off-normal conditions. Los Alamos and Idaho national laboratories developed LAROMance reduced order modeling framework to predict complex material behavior of components and advanced materials in large-scale, safety-critical scenarios that are difficult to study experimentally. Industry and national laboratories use the commercially copyrighted code to support informed decision-making.

Photo Credit: Simulation of nuclear fuel rod material behavior during an off-normal scenario. Photo credit: John Porter McLeod, Allen Hopkins, and Andre Ruybalid (Los Alamos National Laboratory).