Ryan D Swanson

US Patent:

20200387653, Dec 10, 2020

Filed:

Jun 8, 2020

Appl. No.:

16/895076

Inventors:

- Charlotte NC, US
Ryan Trigg SWANSON - Lynchburg VA, US

Assignee:

BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC - Charlotte NC

International Classification:

G06F 30/27
G06N 20/00

Abstract:

A method designs nuclear reactors using design variables and metric variables. A user specifies ranges for the design variables and threshold values for the metric variables and selects design parameter samples. For each sample, the method runs three processes, which compute metric variables for thermal-hydraulics, neutronics, and stress. The method applies a cost function to compute an aggregate residual of the metric variables compared to the threshold values. The method deploys optimization methods, either training a machine learning model using the samples and computed aggregate residuals, or using genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or differential evolution. When using Bayesian optimization, the method shrinks the range for each design variable according to correlation between the respective design variable and estimated residuals using the machine learning model. These steps are repeated until a sample having a smallest residual is unchanged for multiple iterations. The final model assesses relative importance of each design variable.