A Pantheon of The Gods: Open Source Multiphysics Software for Analysis of Fusion Power Plant Systems

Developing commercially viable fusion energy is a challenging multiphysics problem: strong magnetic fields, fluid dynamics, high heat loads and plasma physics all combine and interact to create complex systems that require a holistic approach to engineer properly. Through high performance computing, we have a cost effective pathway to future power solutions through a digital engineering approach. Therefore we need to develop connected multiphysics tools that can scale up to and beyond the exascale to truly be able to perform in silico analysis of prototype fusion power plant designs.

This work presents a collection of open source multiphysics tools covering electromagnetics, neutronics, computational fluid dynamics, heat transfer and isotope transport. These tools can be coupled through the MOOSE framework allowing the concurrent solution of all the physics of interest in a system. And thus can be used for the analysis of power plant systems at scale and enable the acceleration of making fusion power a reality.

Fusion is not a problem that can be solved by a single group and so we leverage the benefits of open source in our digital engineering approach to enable global collaboration in addressing the challenge of climate change and future renewable energy sources.