Research and Development to Accomplish the Strategic Goals

【Overview】

The safety requirement of large industrial plants such as nuclear facilities is extremely high enough to perform real experiments to evaluate the structural integrity of mechanical components in the plants. However, such experiments are performed on independent sets of components because the ability of experimental facilities is limited. Hence, a numerical simulation, which can treat full-scale large industrial plant, attracts more and more attentions with the growing computational technologies. In this research project, next generation seismic simulation technology, which can analyze all the detailed components in large industrial plant collectively on the "K computer", is developed and its usefulness is demonstrated with robust collaboration between industry, academia and government.

【Specific Research Targets】

1) Achieving world-class effective performance in vibration simulation in the field of solid mechanics

One of our objectives is to achieve computation performance on a world-class level in seismic simulation having about 10 billion degrees of freedom using the "K computer" that is expected to have a total of 80,000 CPUs (640,000 core processors) as computing nodes. We will also aim to execute full-scale seismic simulation of a large industrial plant (deterministic approach, probalistic approach) within a period (about 24 hours) that can be incorporated in the design process.

2) Visualizing seismic margin through large-scale data processing and visualization technologies

To enable high-accuracy analysis results obtained by full-scale simulation to be used in monozukuri processes, we will develop technologies for processing and visualizing huge amounts of data at high speed in relation to the state of a large industrial plant as constructed on the "K computer". Furthermore, to enable users to obtain a comprehensive and detailed understanding of the distribution of high-resolution seismic margins throughout a large industrial plant (to be obtained for the first time by the above simulation technology), we will contribute to the development of advanced visualization technologies.

3) Evaluating seismic margins of existing industrial plants under collaboration with industry members

The functions of the developed system are well tested and the usefulness of the system will be demonstrated under collaboration with an industry consortium. Targeting boiling-water nuclear reactors, we will perform integrated evaluations of seismic margins of entire existing industrial plants using complementary deterministic and probalistic approaches.

Software: ADV_Kei (deterministic approach), Di-STEP (probalistic approach)