Coupled thermomechanical modeling using dissimilar geometries in arpeggio.

Technical Report · Mon Nov 01 04:00:00 EDT 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1028947· OSTI ID:1028947

Kostka, Timothy D; Templeton, Jeremy Alan

Performing coupled thermomechanical simulations is becoming an increasingly important aspect of nuclear weapon (NW) safety assessments in abnormal thermal environments. While such capabilities exist in SIERRA, they have thus far been used only in a limited sense to investigate NW safety themes. An important limiting factor is the difficulty associated with developing geometries and meshes appropriate for both thermal and mechanical finite element models, which has limited thermomechanical analysis to simplified configurations. This work addresses the issue of how to perform coupled analyses on models where the underlying geometries and associated meshes are different and tailored to their relevant physics. Such an approach will reduce the model building effort and enable previously developed single-physics models to be leveraged in future coupled simulations. A combined-environment approach is presented in this report using SIERRA tools, with quantitative comparisons made between different options in SIERRA. This report summarizes efforts on running a coupled thermomechanical analysis using the SIERRA Arpeggio code.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1028947
• Report Number(s): SAND2010-7746
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
A CODES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
FINITE ELEMENT METHOD
MECHANICAL PROPERTIES
MESH GENERATION
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
S CODES
SAFETY ANALYSIS
THERMODYNAMIC PROPERTIES