SolidWorks® is a 3-dimensional design and mechanical engineering software used under license from Solidworks Corporation. It has been used extensively in the design and analysis of the Sectored, Compact Reactor (SCoRe) developed at UNM-ISNPS, a liquid-metal cooled space power reactor which prevents single-point failure within its cooling loops, and maintains subcriticality in the case of a launch abort incident [32, 33]. Originally modeled in SolidWorks®, this SCoRe concept model was used to assist and verify geometry inputs for the neutronics codes MCNP5 and MCNPX. Since SolidWorks has the capability of entering physical properties for the structural materials in the SCoRe, such as density, the mass of the various components can be compared with the output from MCNP to verify the correct modeling of the system. SolidWorks® has also been helpful to ISNPS engineers in designing nuclear radiation shields and other space nuclear reactors, such as heat pipe-cooled reactors for which the main challenge is the routing of the relatively large number of reactor heat pipes around or through the radiation shield (Fig. 27), and their coupling to the energy conversion units in the space power system. The mechanical animation capability of SolidWorks® has also been used successfully to obtain snapshots of space reactor power systems with segmented and deployable radiation panels, at different times during the deployment process in space orbit.
Figure 26. Isometric View of the Scalable AMTEC Integrated Reactor Space Power System (SAIRS-C) [34].
Figure 27. Cross-sectional and Isometric Views of the HP Reactor and the Radiation Shield designs developed at the University of New Mexico's Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies for the power system in Fig. 26 [32].
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