Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering Working Group (AMME-WG)

The Generation IV Forum (GIF) Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering (AMME) Working Group (WG) was established in October 2023.  It continues the work launched within the GIF AMME-Task Force established in 2018.

AMME WG provides a platform for promoting the use of advanced manufacturing and materials engineering technology to reduce the time to deployment of advanced reactor systems. A special focus of AMME WG is to facilitate international collaboration on the qualification of advanced manufacturing and materials engineering processes for use in Generation IV reactors.

The AMME-WG has established Task Groups (TG) in four topic areas:

Task Group 1. Survey on advanced manufacturing application in industry

TG 1 develops, maintains, and distributes a survey to gauge current sentiment in the Gen IV reactor community on the utility of advanced manufacturing.

Task Group 2. Sharing, coordination, and demonstration of work on the qualification of advanced manufacturing

TG 2 provides a forum for sharing, coordination, and demonstration of work on the qualification of advanced manufacturing and materials engineering techniques and develops and maintains a platform for exchanging information on these topics.

Task Group 3. Modeling and simulation approaches for the qualification of advanced manufacturing

TG 3 develops activities and projects focused on the innovative use of modelling and simulation (M&S) to accelerate the qualification of advanced manufacturing techniques, with a particular focus on benchmarking/demonstration problems to assess the readiness of the community to apply advanced M&S to qualify new manufacturing processes.

Task Group 4. Experimental approaches for the qualification of advanced manufacturing

TG 4 supports the development of benchmark studies to manufacture and characterize the performance of reactor relevant components and explore accelerated testing methodologies aiming to support industry’s adoption of advanced manufacturing.

The list of references

  1. US AMMT materials:
  1. Accelerating the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies for Gen IV nuclear reactors through international collaboration, I. J. van Rooyen, L. Ivan, M. Messner, L. Edwards, E. Abonneau, Y. Kamiji, S. Lowe, K.-F. Nilsson, S. Okajima, M. Pouchon, A. Storer, S. Teysseyre, K. Toyota, L. Zhang, J. -Y. Park, S. H. Kang, S.-G. Park, D. Costa, T. Funahashi, and C. Morley, Proc. G4SR-4 Toronto, Canada, Oct 3-6, 2022

GIF AMME-Task Force

The GIF Advanced Manufacturing Materials Engineering Task Force was formed in 2018 to investigate how collaborative R&D could be used to enable such advances to reduce the time to deployment of Gen IV and comparable advanced reactors.

Initially, the Task Force developed the hypothesis, designed for testing using a survey: “That the development of advanced reactor systems to provide clean energy around the world can benefit from international collaborations in the development of advanced manufacturing technologies and techniques.”

The results of the subsequent survey showed that there is a very real interest in both research institutions and nuclear companies within GIF countries in active collaboration supporting Advanced Materials and Manufacturing solutions to a High Technology Readiness Level (TRL).

While surveys provide good insight as to the views and activities of the various parts of the nuclear supply chain regarding advanced manufacturing The Task Force realized that these communities need to meet and communicate if a consensual opinion on the on the most appropriate and beneficial way to utilize advanced manufacturing is to be formed. Consequently, the primary activity of the Task Force became the design and implementation of a series of workshops.

The Task Force’s first Advanced Manufacturing Workshop was held at the Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris in conjunction with a R&D Infrastructure Task Force (RDTF) meeting on 18- 20 February 2020. The purpose of the workshop was to identify opportunities where collaboration could lead to a reduction in the time to deployment of advanced manufacturing for advanced reactors. Workshop participants provided a broad representation from across the nuclear industry, which included reactor vendors, nuclear supply chain firms, regulators, national laboratories, and R&D providers.

Subsequently, a workshop on Modelling and Simulation was held in November 2021. As travel for many countries was still affected by COVID-19 it was held as a virtual workshop facilitated by GIF/NEA. As in 2020, the attendees of this workshop represented reactor vendors, regulators, national laboratories, and R&D providers from across the nuclear industry. The format included four plenary talks looking at how Modelling and Simulation could support qualification followed by four talks giving the perspective from Designers and Vendors and finishing with a round table discussion. As in previous workshops this was followed by brainstorming in small groups in which the attendees discussed and assessed options and opportunities for M&S that would help to accelerate qualification of advanced manufacturing.

Given the difficulties the Modelling and Simulation workshop had in identifying clear ways forward the Task force held a virtual workshop in June 2022 focused on the concrete steps required to accelerate the qualification of materials and components followed by a face-to-face workshop to be held at The GIF industrial Forum in October 2022.

 The AMME-TF held its final, in person, workshop on October 3rd, 2022, as part of the 4th International Conference on Generation IV and Small Reactors (G4SR-4) and the GIF Industry Forum 2022. Consequently, this workshop was jointly held by the GIF AMME-TF and the Canadian Advanced Manufacturing in Nuclear Alliance (CAMiNA).

The workshop identified the following ideas as key opportunities for international collaboration on advanced materials and manufacturing techniques for Generation IV reactors:

  1. Disseminate, collate, and publish results from a yearly survey of reactor and component vendors focused on identify key manufacturing issues and how these issues evolve over time.
  2. Identify and widely distribute the component and material types, representative loading conditions, and corresponding design limit states that are broadly representative of a wide range of likely advanced manufactured Gen IV components.
  3. Conduct round robin benchmark studies for accelerated qualification approaches to provide codes and standards bodies and regulators evidence of their effectiveness, compared to slower, conventional qualification approaches.
  4. Setup a forum for sharing, coordinating, and harmonizing work on advanced manufactured components at worldwide codes and standards bodies.

After these five years of work, the key achievement of the Task Force has been the identification of and engagement with a community that share the Task Force’s vision and have the potential to undertake collaborative work to further the primary Task Force aim: to enable the utilization of advanced manufacturing to reduce the time to deployment of advanced high temperature reactors. Interactions with this community continue and present the primary opportunities for future activities.

In addition, the following accomplishments have been identified:

  1. The creation of tools to engage the community has led to both GIF and the community gaining a better understanding of cognate activities in other business and regulatory environment worldwide.
  2. The development of an understanding in the community that constraints and challenges of introducing advanced manufacturing into the nuclear supply chain are universal and that, in the case of advanced high temperature reactors GIF is the key body capable of creating an international framework for sharing information to support the introduction of advanced manufacturing.
  3. Understanding that the community possesses heterogeneous relevant expertise in different domains (e.g., reactor developers, supply chain providers, researchers. regulators) which, collectively, possess significant potential impact on accelerating deployment of Generation IV reactors.
  4. Creating awareness in the larger community of the current opportunities and challenges remain regarding the implementation of advanced manufacturing for high temperature reactors.

Generation IV International Forum Site - Contact