SALOME as a Platform for Magneto-Mechanical Simulation
The design of superconducting magnets for accelerator and detector components dedicated to the future of high energy physics requires detailed analysis of their mechanical behavior, in particular under magnetic and/or thermal solicitations. Numerical simulation is more and more used to optimize these components and to improve their performances in constrained environments. In this context, the numerical modeling process may require to operate several computing codes, which involves the implementation of spatial discretization (meshes) that are not always compatible together. This situation raises the problem of data transfer and of possible dispersion of simulation parameters. Moreover, the numerical modeling process is not always formalized, and it can be difficult to iterate in the case of parametric studies. This paper describes the implementation of magneto-mechanical numerical processes into the SALOME open source platform. SALOME is a numerical framework which offers interoperability between Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) simulation software. It makes the implementation of coupling between computing codes (computation schemes) accessible. This simulation platform also provides a generic and efficient user interface, and is as well fully scriptable in Python language. On the basis of the design of the SMC dipole magnet, the authors will describe the various modules of the platform (geometry, mesh, supervision and visualization), and present the status of the developments in progress. It will be pointed out what can be gained for magnet designers in terms of process formalization and transfer of know-how, and what is the level of complexity for the development of a dedicated software tool.