search

Fusion-Power-Plant-Framework / bluemira

Bluemira is an integrated inter-disciplinary design tool for future fusion reactors. It incorporates several modules, some of which rely on other codes, to carry out a range of typical conceptual fusion reactor design activities.
https://bluemira.readthedocs.io/
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
67 stars 16 forks source link

Add material metadata for neutronics CAD #302

Open helen-brooks opened 3 years ago

helen-brooks commented 3 years ago

Description of issue / requirement to address

The STP CAD output files need material metadata attached to volumes or groups of volumes so that it can be more easily used in neutronics analysis. The format should be of the form mat:MATNAME in order to be understood by DAGMC, and it should be findable by CAD software such as cubit. The difficulty is there is not an agreed-upon convention for the STP file format, so the primary task will be to identify how OCC and Cubit respectively interact with the data. When the solution has become apparent, I'll update this issue.

Proposed solution

To be updated

DanShort12 commented 3 years ago

Hi @helen-brooks - aware you're currently looking at OCC, since that's what the legacy BLUEPRINT stuff is using to generate CAD at the moment, but just to note for future work that I found this tutorial for how to link materials to CAD in FreeCAD... possibly also relevant for @ivanmaione's work on interfacing with gmsh. I have a port of our materials module sat somewhere lowish on my todo list for a while (see #66), which I should probably pick up and at least get a first pass in for. Apologies for thread hijacking if some of that info isn't immediately relevant, I just wanted to make sure some dots are joined up mainly as a self-reminder 🙂.

helen-brooks commented 3 years ago

Thanks for the link @DanShort12 . I suppose we'll need two solutions if the plan is to migrate to a new CAD engine; one to make the CAD work now, and one to make it work after the transition if that's happening sooner rather than later. I also didn't even know there was a materials module... But in any case to get things working it doesn't have to be a realistic material with composition information, but even just getting something like Cubit to recognise names would be a start.