University of Liverpool Faculty of Science and Engineering
Digital twins and integrated digital environments are the building blocks of Industry 4.0 – the fourth industrial revolution. Although the concepts and theoretical benefits of Industry 4.0 are well established, its realisation is still in its infancy and there are few examples of how to implement digital twins in practice .
The Integrated Nuclear Design Environment (INDE), a conceptual framework that integrates predictive models and real-world data through the lifecycle of a nuclear plant, is becoming the UK sector approach to realising these digital technologies.
Through research led by Professor Eann Patterson from the University of Liverpool, a Nuclear Virtual Engineering Capability (NVEC) project has delivered a proof of principle of the INDE approach. Within this project, the University of Liverpool and collaborative partners have created a prototype software architecture and real-world case studies that demonstrate the benefits of this approach. Although developed for nuclear powerplants, the architecture could be readily applied to other sectors to allow the integration of data and technologies without IP concerns.
INDE originated from Liverpool’s work on integrating strain-field data through product lifecycles. INDE is a conceptual framework integrating the lifecycle of nuclear powerplants from prototype design, through operations to decommissioning, and waste disposal. Empowering a new way of working, this virtual environment enables large project delivery by allowing collaboration and sharing of resources between companies from within the nuclear industry or across diverse supply chains or sectors. Unlike standard digital twins, this framework connects a series of multiscale, multiphysics models. Updating these models with measurement data from experiments, in-service monitoring and plant inspections then ensures they are an appropriate representation of the real-world.
Joint originator NNL championed the INDE approach with the Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory Board resulting in them recommending Virtual Engineering as a research theme. The UK Government embedded this theme in the £180M Nuclear Innovation Programme and funded the £3.6M NVEC project led by Jacobs and including the University of Liverpool and the Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC). Phase 1 of this project demonstrated a proof of principle for the INDE. As part of this, VEC developed a prototype digital architecture. This is a modular software ‘backbone’ that facilitates collaboration, allowing improved design insights and a greater understanding of the interrelations of activities across projects. This approach enables technologies from multiple parties to be ‘plugged and played’ without IP concerns and is readily adaptable to other sectors.
The nuclear industry has long design and build timeframes, skills shortages, and escalating project and decommissioning costs. Digital technologies offer a solution to these challenges by using predictive models to reduce development timescales and resources while increasing reliability and safety. However, the nuclear sector is conservative, risk-averse and cautious about working collaboratively.
Jacobs used this architecture to integrate several standalone software codes into a ‘Graphite Workbench tool’ for EDF Energy. This toolkit is used to model the impact of graphite degradation on the structural integrity of Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors. The results proved the suitability of the architecture design and the viability of coupling codes. The processing time reduced from 4 days to ~4 hours.
NNL has applied the INDE principles to customer projects with Sellafield, including developing a digital decommissioning replica of the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo. Implementation of this replica has reduced uncertainties in the project baseline, with calculated savings of between £6M and £8M over the 25+ year lifetime of waste retrievals. The success of this project is changing the working practices in Sellafield, and they are increasingly requesting digital tools and online guidance rather than technical reports as project deliverables. The INDE approach is also part of the Small Modular Reactor programme and nuclear propulsion programmes led by Rolls-Royce.
The UK fusion community have also adopted INDE. The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP, a £220M UK government-funded initiative to create a conceptual design of a commercially viable fusion powerplant by 2040) embedded the INDE principles into their business proposal. Compared to conventional methods, this reduced the project baseline by 20 years and is estimated by UKAEA to save millions of pounds in development and testing.
The INDE is the first stage in transforming the way that the UK nuclear industry will design and build new facilities and strengthen capabilities across the sector for the future. The digital architecture has demonstrated the potential to foster more efficient and innovative methods of working. It brings greater clarity of the impacts of new designs and processes across the sector, at a much earlier stage.
The Virtual Engineering Centre has been appointed as academic lead partner in a £2.9M research programme to set up and run a Digital Reactor Design partnership.
Researchers are building on successes using the ‘digital twin’ in the aerospace industry, applying them to a new generation of nuclear power stations.
