Knowledge-Based Information Resource Management System for Materials of Fast Reactors

In the development of advanced fast reactors, materials and coolant/material interactions pose a critical barrier for higher temperature and longer core life designs. For advanced burner reactors (sodium cooled), experience has shown that the qualified structural materials and fuel cladding severely limits the economic performance. In other liquid metal cooled reactor concepts, advanced materials and better understanding and control of coolant and materials interactions are necessary for realizing the potentials. Researches from universities, national laboratories and related industrial participants have been continuously generating invaluable data and knowledge about materials and their interactions with coolants in the past few decades. Under the consideration of cost and time constraints, the paradigm of designing and implementing a successful Gen IV Nuclear Energy Systems can be shifted and updated via the integration of information and internet technologies. Such efforts can be better visualized by implementing collective (centralized or distributed) data storages to serve the community with organized material data sets. Material property data provided by MatWeb.com and the ongoing development of web-based GEN IV material handbook are few examples. From system design perspective, sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) proposed in the GEN IV system have been significantly developed. According to the GEN IV ten-year program plan, current R&D work will be pointed to demonstration of the design and safety characteristics, and design optimization. All of those activities follow the path of data generation, analysis, knowledge discovery and finally decision making and implementation. We are proposing to create a modularized web-based information system with models to systematically catalog existing data and guide the new development and testing to acquire new data. Technically speaking, information retrieval and knowledge discovery tools will be implemented for researchers with both information lookup options from material database and technology/development gap analysis from intelligent agent and reporting components. The goal of the system is not only to provide another database, but also to create a sharable and expandable platform-free, location-free online system for research institutes and industrial partners.