Title
Rethinking sensitivity analysis of nuclear simulations with topology
Abstract
In nuclear engineering, understanding the safety margins of the nuclear reactor via simulations is arguably of paramount importance in predicting and preventing nuclear accidents. It is therefore crucial to perform sensitivity analysis to understand how changes in the model inputs affect the outputs. Modern nuclear simulation tools rely on numerical representations of the sensitivity information — inherently lacking in visual encodings — offering limited effectiveness in communicating and exploring the generated data. In this paper, we design a framework for sensitivity analysis and visualization of multidimensional nuclear simulation data using partition-based, topology-inspired regression models and report on its efficacy. We rely on the established Morse-Smale regression technique, which allows us to partition the domain into monotonic regions where easily interpretable linear models can be used to assess the influence of inputs on the output variability. The underlying computation is augmented with an intuitive and interactive visual design to effectively communicate sensitivity information to nuclear scientists. Our framework is being deployed into the multipurpose probabilistic risk assessment and uncertainty quantification framework RAVEN (Reactor Analysis and Virtual Control Environment). We evaluate our framework using a simulation dataset studying nuclear fuel performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/PACIFICVIS.2016.7465252
2016 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Sensitivity analysis,uncertainty,nuclear simulation,computational topology
Data mining,Communication design,Uncertainty quantification,Nuclear reactor,Visualization,Probabilistic risk assessment,Computer science,Linear model,Computational topology,Computation
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2165-8765
1
0.35
References 
Authors
21
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dan Maljovec1593.37
Bei Wang252861.48
Paul Rosen3206.77
Andrea Alfonsi420.71
Giovanni Pastore510.35
Cristian Rabiti621.05
Valerio Pascucci73241192.33