Speaker
Description
The Second Target Station (STS) project is progressing through the preliminary design phase with a driving goal of creating the world's brightest neutron source. To achieve this, the spallation target must accept focused proton pulses with high energy (1.3 GeV/proton), high power (700 kW), and high rate (15 Hz) over a design life of 10 years with high availability. Testing resources are quite limited in this design space, and engineers must instead rely heavily upon detailed analysis and simulations to inform design decisions.
This presentation will describe the suite of tools used and developed at STS to simulate target structural lifetime performance. This analysis workflow leverages codes developed at US national labs (i.e. CUBIT meshing, SIERRA multiphysics, ParaView postprocessing, DAKOTA optimization) along with custom Python modules (i.e. neutronics interpolation, critical plane fatigue analysis) to create a highly automated and scalable simulation tool. Material static structural and fatigue properties are key inputs and are derived from best available data under representative conditions (e.g. solution annealed Inconel 718 at beginning of service life, tungsten and tantalum in irradiated condition, copper with radiation swelling). The tool is then used to guide design optimization of the selected edge-cooled target design under a variety of representative load scenarios.
