Just like artists need to consider the skeleton and muscle structures before sculpturing or drawing the actual person, natural language approach to universal modeling of mechical structures begins with how it is designed. A piping system is modeled from source to sink, making sure all the branches are closed. And a nuclear space reactor core can naturally be modeled by stepping through a logical design process, as described below.
The designer starts with the fuel rods. He decides to put them in a hexagonal structure, with five rods on each side and filling equispacely within the hexagon. He wants to put some odd rods in the structure whose locations are specified by how many rods they are from the center and from the diagonal of the hexagon counting upwards.
The hexagon structure, or matrix, is placed in a cylindrical vessel, or assembly. Again, there are some odd matrices that need to be treated similarly as the odd rods.
Well, so far so good, except hexagons do not fit snugly in a round structure. The designer have to cut off some rods at the boundary of the assembly. He needs, therefore, also cut off the associated area in the hexagon where these rods are located.
A not so obvious design optimization aspect is the filling of gaps that pop up when hexagons are arranged equispacedly around inner hexagons. So the final step is squeezing some of the matrices back in toward the center to fill the gap, without sticking out of the vessel wall.
The following four drawings illustrate the two cutting off steps and one squeezing step.
With Cut-off Rods
Cut-off Matrices
Squeezed in Matrices
This is how the drawings are actually made. The natural modeling allows easy understanding of the graphic process and future modification of the drawing, which could be done as design changes.
To see a demo of how this is done, simply connect to the OUTNET 1(1st link at top of homepage) via the vnc(virtual networking computing) and enter 'u' to get on ROBACUS' main menu. Then click the JIMO NUCLEAR SYSTEM menu and let the default answers lead you down the modeling process by keeping on pressing the [Enter] key or the left mouse button, or, to speed up the demo, press the right mouse button to let the software robot do the processing for you.
Just remember that the same process used to take weeks. Now the demo is only minutes manually, or seconds by software robot.
