Digitalization Isn't a Track Meet, It's a Marathon: The METL Digitalization Journey

Advanced nuclear is challenged to design and construct on short timelines, with smaller budgets and fewer workers. Digitalization can help companies overcome these constraints. Unfortunately, a digital twin (DT) is often presented as a monolith. This results in organizations abandoning DTs as having benefits that are minimal or unrealized in time. Many perceive DTs as too large an undertaking to even begin. However, digitalization isn't a track meet; it's a marathon of incremental milestones. And, like all races, it has a starting line. This session will summarize a journey that Argonne National Laboratory and Implexus Lab made to digitize the Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL), a test facility for advancing sodium fast reactors. Components were designed with Inventor software and assembled in Navisworks software, and AutoCAD software generated construction documents. Integrating with Revit provided a DT foundation. Ultimately, the suite of Autodesk tools enabled the creation of a DT boasting live data visualization within a virtual reality (VR) environment.