Abstract
Tritium management is critical for the safety, sustainability, and economics of fusion energy systems, and advanced and reliable modeling tools help accelerate the development of tritium technologies. This paper presents the Tritium Migration Analysis Program, Version 8 (TMAP8), an open-source, MOOSE-based application developed to provide state-of-the-art tritium transport and fuel cycle modeling capabilities. TMAP8 aims to expand the capabilities of previous versions (i.e., TMAP4 and TMAP7) by leveraging modern computational techniques, ensuring high software quality assurance standards (key to building trust), and enabling multispecies, multiscale, and multiphysics simulations for integrated tritium transport modeling in complex geometries. This paper outlines TMAP8’s scope and rigorous development practices, emphasizing its transparency, accessibility, modularity, and reliability. We present the current suite of verification and validation cases based on those from TMAP4, demonstrating TMAP8’s accuracy and reliability against analytical solutions and experimental data. Additionally, the paper showcases TMAP8’s integrated fuel cycle modeling capabilities, highlighting its applicability at various scales and levels. The TMAP8 code and documentation are openly available, promoting collaborative development and widespread adoption within the fusion community. Future work will soon expand TMAP8’s verification and validation suite to include those from TMAP7 and other recent experimental studies for validation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 114874 |
| Journal | Fusion Engineering and Design |
| Volume | 214 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2025 |
Funding
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, and authored by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517. This work was also supported through INL's Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD), United States Program under DOE Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517. The United States Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. This research made use of the resources of the High Performance Computing Center at Idaho National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities, United States under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517. To alleviate these limitations and address the modeling needs of the growing fusion industry, INL is developing a new version of TMAP based on the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework: TMAP8 [10\u201312] . MOOSE is an open source framework developed primarily by INL with contributions from many institutions worldwide [13] . MOOSE has several attributes that make it a very powerful tool for the rapid development of energy systems. On a technical level, (1) it was designed to perform complex multiphysics simulation on one integrated platform with in-memory coupling, (2) it enables massively parallel simulations on thousands of cores [13] , (3) it is modular and supports agile, concurrent development, and (4) it is dimension agnostic, meaning that it supports 0D, 1D, two-dimensional (2D), and three-dimensional (3D) simulations without additional code development. It has also been demonstrated to enable simulations on computer-aided design (often called CAD) geometries, and can therefore model complex fusion geometries [14] . Moreover, MOOSE is open source and follows high software quality assurance (SQA) standards. This openness increases its availability, transparency, and reach, while the high SQA standards ensure its reliability. MOOSE, supported by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy\u2019s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Program, has been successfully applied in the fission energy space where it enables many MOOSE-based applications [15\u201323] . MOOSE is currently being leveraged in the fusion energy space [24\u201327] , and TMAP8 is one of the products of this effort [10\u201312] . This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences , and authored by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517 . This work was also supported through INL\u2019s Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program under DOE Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517 . The United States Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. This research made use of the resources of the High Performance Computing Center at Idaho National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517 .
Keywords
- Computational fusion
- MOOSE
- Software quality assurance
- TMAP
- Tritium transport and fuel cycle
- Verification and validation