Imperial and AMPERA join forces to develop digital twin platform for advanced nuclear energy systems

Imperial College London researchers have started a £7 million partnership with AMPERA to develop a digital twin platform for energy systems.

The advanced energy company, based in Florida, US, specialises in developing highly innovative small modular nuclear reactors, or microreactors, designed to power individual data centres, factories and defence and maritime applications.

“This collaboration will supercharge every aspect of our technology development. Imperial College London is a world-leading university, and the technology has the potential to transform how complex systems are understood, monitored, optimised and managed." Brian Matthews AMPERA Founder and CEO

AMPERA aims to use digital twins, or real-time digital representations, to accelerate the design and deployment of systems such as microreactors, improve their performance, and eventually to help finely control and automate their operation.

Imperial and AMPERA plan to co-develop a digital twinning platform called NeuralTwin™ that will improve on the performance of typical digital twins by combining high-fidelity physics simulations with faster AI surrogates trained to predict the effects of engineering decisions, drawing on the laws of physics, without comprehensively modelling them.

The collaboration will benefit from the academic expertise in computational modelling of Professor Christopher Pain, who has a long track record of collaboration with major industry partners, and Dr Jiansheng Xiang, both in Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering.

The technology they are developing will complement other advanced technologies AMPERA is using such as rapid 3D-printing of reactor cores, a subcritical architecture that eliminates the risk of uncontrolled reactions by making reactions dependent upon an external neutron generator, and use of thorium fuel.

“This collaboration will supercharge every aspect of our technology development,” said AMPERA Founder and CEO Brian Matthews. “Imperial College London is a world-leading university, and the technology has the potential to transform how complex systems are understood, monitored, optimised and managed. From licensing to engineering analysis to autonomous operations, we see NeuralTwin as being a marketplace differentiator.”

“We are passionate about translating cutting-edge academic research into the commercial sector where it can accelerate the development of next-generation energy systems,” said Professor Christopher Pain at Imperial College London.

“This collaboration brings together two organisations focused on neural physics for processing, analysing and executing ultra-complex operations in the safest, quickest way possible.”

“NeuralTwin reflects an important next step in bringing together scientific machine learning, digital twins, and high-fidelity computational methods,” said Dr Jiansheng Xiang, Co-Investigator at Imperial College London.