ONRAMP provides current and future stakeholders with centralized access to the rich resources available from ORNL teams. Through these partnerships, ORNL offers the full breadth of modeling and simulation solutions for the entire nuclear fuel life cycle that encompasses current operating LWRs, next generation LWRs (including SMRs), the spectrum of advanced reactors under development such as molten salt reactors (solid and liquid fuel), gas-cooled reactors, and sodium fast reactors, as well as research reactors, fusion energy systems, and more.
Opportunities for Partners
| Inform: | Participate in workshops and symposia to present current approaches and find out what is possible using ORNL's advanced techniques and computing resources. Tour ORNL facilities to observe state-of-the-are practices in facility operation and experimentation. |
| Educate: | Choose from a wide array of training courses to gain hands-on experience using advanced tools. |
| Analyze: | Partner with ORNL for specialized analysis of your systems, working in our collaboration space, and accessing world class computing resources. |
| Enhance: | Establish partnerships to develop enhanced computational methods and data to better meet specialized needs and to realize the possibilities of HPC. |
| Validate: | Quantify your validation basis by applying advanced approaches to assess available experiments and then enhance understanding through the design and operation of new benchmark quality experiments for licensing. |
| Deploy: | Reap the benefits of quality assurance and archival analysis for licensing and deployment. |
| Commercialize: | In certain cases, commercial licensing opportunities are available. These agreements may be on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis if they are limited to a specific field of use. Said licenses may be for technologies that are bound by export control obligations. |
We seek to meet the needs of the nuclear community, and we can customize a partnership to meet your expectations. Building on experience with previous, ongoing, and proposed partnerships, several areas of collaboration and associated benefits are available, as outlined below.
FIRST-OF-A-KIND COLLABORATIVE MODELING AND ANALYSIS
The development and application of advanced analysis capabilities and methodologies are critical for the introduction of new nuclear technologies to the commercial market in areas such as design optimization, safety
evaluation, operational performance, and regulatory licensing. ONRAMP provides the opportunity for direct collaboration with ORNL, with a focus on developing high value, high impact solutions for problems specific to the partnering organizations. Such collaborations bring the breadth of ORNL’s modeling and simulation expertise to solve complex, challenging problems, with potential benefits being accelerated technology deployment, elimination of barriers to technology adoption, and direct transfer of knowledge and expertise to the partner organization.
COMMERCIAL NUCLEAR MARKET EXPOSURE
ONRAMP brings together a multitude of commercial nuclear market stakeholders across the spectrum of nuclear fuel cycle activities, including nuclear utilities, vendors, component suppliers, and service companies. From the perspective of a commercial entity, a partnership allows for direct access to future clients via the ONRAMP network, as well as market recognition exposure. Partners benefit through having company information and logos featured in highly visible ONRAMP literature.
CUSTOMIZED CODE MODEL AND FEATURE DEVELOPMENT
The addition of new models and software features is critical to enhancing a code’s predictive capability and usability for the performance of nuclear analyses. This is especially helpful as additional data become available through experimental test programs and reactor and fuel measurements. Incorporation of the end user requirements and feedback, as an essential part of the software development process, is a cornerstone of ONRAMP, ensuring that tools provide appropriate levels of fidelity and timely performance for integration and use by the ONRAMP community.
DESIGN AND OPERATION OF NEW EXPERIMENTS
Development and deployment of new reactors and fuel products require data to fill knowledge gaps in physical models and to provide a basis for model validation. High-fidelity simulations, combined with expert knowledge of data requirements, can help define experiments that provide the maximum value for the resources invested. Virtual experiments performed with ONRAMP simulation software can be used to optimize experimental design to focus on the key quantities of interest. The goal is to maximize the quality and amount of data obtained with the minimum number of experiments.
ACCESS TO COMMODITY COMPUTING RESOURCES
ONRAMP provides access to software on industry-class, high performance computers using secure access protocols that ensure the requirements of proprietary data restrictions and satisfy the nuclear export control regulations. The software provided is configured to meet SQA standards, with operating systems and code versions maintained according to the current release. ONRAMP users have access to the latest software releases, eliminating the need for local software installation and configuration.
ACCESS TO AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER FROM ORNL MODELING EXPERTS
ONRAMP partners benefit from access to ORNL’s software developers and nuclear modeling experts, whose expertise spans the spectrum of nuclear applications. This includes expertise in all areas related to nuclear technology, including reactor physics, radiation transport, thermal-hydraulics, nuclear fuels and materials, chemistry, and structural mechanics. More importantly, ORNL has extensive experience in coupled multiphysics modeling and analysis that is critical for reactor transient and safety analysis. ORNL subject matter experts can lead and support the model development and qualification activities, thus saving time and resources for the partnering organizations in addressing challenging issues. Collaboratively developed and qualified models can be hosted and maintained (with software upgrade support) on the ORNL commodity clusters for partners to gain secure access.
VALIDATION OF CODES FOR SPECIFIC APPLICATIONS
Nuclear analysis performed for a given application requires a validation basis, especially if the analysis is to be used in a regulatory environment. ONRAMP can assist users in developing a validation framework for specific applications using publicly available data as well as proprietary data. Validation test data from our current and previous experimental programs can be made available to fulfill specific needs.
ASSISTANCE IN PROPOSAL PREPARATION FOR FUNDING OPPORTUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS AND HPC RESOURCE ALLOCATIONS
As a DOE laboratory, ORNL has extensive experience in developing proposals and can aid ONRAMP partners in responding to government funding opportunity announcements (FOAs), as well as proposals for HPC resource allocations on leadership class machines.
We can also collaborate through direct funding mechanisms with domestic and international companies and government agencies through a commercial technology licensing agreement, a Strategic Partnership Project (SPP), a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), or a streamlined agreement for specialized workshops and training opportunities.
PRIORITY USER SUPPORT
Partners have access to software user support that is important for developing and maintaining an experienced user base for the ONRAMP codes. Priority user support is designed for users who regularly work with application analyses with completions that are time critical, such as reactor operations support.
ONRAMP USERS’ COMMUNITY
The ONRAMP users’ community is comprised of all users of ONRAMP codes, with all users having access to beta releases of the software. This community is critical to the software testing and feedback process. Regular training courses for ONRAMP software products are offered as a means to ensure that an experienced user base is maintained. Training courses include code packages (theory and use) and code applications of interest to the user community. Code user groups supplement training by facilitating a group interaction of users’ shared experiences. Code user groups provide a feedback mechanism to the code developers, and they may suggest new code capabilities and features. Special topic application workshops are offered based on the interest of the ONRAMP community. Such workshops may be based on standard nuclear analyses, as might be performed for licensing basis calculations, or they may be based on addressing emerging industry, regulatory, or research issues. In addition, such workshops may be based on demonstrating new, first-of-a-kind code capabilities and the new applications that are made possible. Workshops may be suggested by the ONRAMP users’ group community. The ONRAMP newsletter informs the community of all beta releases, training courses, workshops, and code users’ group meetings.