dover

DOVER — Deck-based Open-source Visualisation Engine for Reactors.

⚠️ Research, education and V&V only. Not for nuclear facility operation, reactor control, licensing, safety-critical decisions or emergency response. See the workspace RESPONSIBLE_USE.md.

⚠️ Unverified until validated. All code in this workspace is unverified and untrusted unless a specific verification & validation (V&V) case demonstrates otherwise.

What DOVER is for: the low-fidelity counterpart of DHOBY GHAUT

DOVER is the low-fidelity equivalent of DHOBY GHAUT (maintainer, 2026-09-25). DHOBY GHAUT is the Digital High-fidelity Orchestration GUI home: its studios drive the high-fidelity solvers (outram-mc Monte Carlo, cfMesh meshing). DOVER occupies the same role at low fidelity, visualising reactors from input decks.

The details are not decided yet: which low-fidelity models it drives, the deck schema (TOML is the current direction, below), and whether it carries a windowing GUI as DHOBY GHAUT does. Each needs the maintainer's decision, and the workspace must be searched before any of it is built. Low-fidelity models already live elsewhere, e.g. the hierarchical surrogates in outram-park-digital-twin-engine's simulators.

Direction: TOML input decks, steady-state and dynamic runs (2026-09-25)

Maintainer direction, 2026-09-25, stated as tentative ("perhaps"), and settled the same day by the first model landing on it (below):

• Input decks are TOML files, serialised and deserialised by a reader against a schema, so a deck is a validated, typed document rather than free text. schema_version = 1; unknown keys are rejected, not ignored.
• DOVER runs steady-state simulations, like DWSIM (a flowsheet solved to steady state), and dynamic simulations as well.

Already in the workspace; reuse before writing anything (checked 2026-09-25):

• outram-park-fork-dwsim-libs: the Rust translation of DWSIM's kernels, including flowsheet, flowsheet_solver and dynamics modules plus the unit operations (heater, cooler, pump, valve, heat exchanger, separator, …). The DWSIM-like steady-state path should compose these, not duplicate them.
• chem-eng-real-time-process-control-simulator: exact zero-order-hold transfer-function blocks for dynamic process-control runs.
• serde and toml are already in the root [workspace.dependencies] (kovan uses them for its own files). No crate currently reads a simulation input deck against a schema, so the deck reader is the new part. CORRECTED 2026-09-30 — that reader now exists: dover::deck parses a TOML deck into a typed Deck (schema_version = 1, deny_unknown_fields), and dover depends on serde and toml.

Not decided: the schema's form and versioning, which models a deck may name, and whether DOVER has a windowing GUI.

Status

Created 2026-09-25 as an empty skeleton. Nothing is implemented: there is no deck format, no visualisation engine, no physics, no public API and no dependency. CORRECTED 2026-09-25 — one model has landed, below. There is still no visualisation engine and no GUI.

First model: steam methane reforming in a CSTR (2026-09-25)

Maintainer direction: "draft me a steam methane reforming CSTR in Dover, headless." Two independent reactions in a perfectly-mixed tank at steady state:

$$\text{CH}_4 + \text{H}_2\text{O} \rightleftharpoons \text{CO} + 3,\text{H}_2 \quad (\text{reforming, strongly endothermic})$$

$$\text{CO} + \text{H}_2\text{O} \rightleftharpoons \text{CO}_2 + \text{H}_2 \quad (\text{water-gas shift, mildly exothermic})$$

The reactor itself is outram-park-fork-dwsim-libs' Cstr — DOVER supplies the chemistry and the deck and does not reimplement a reactor.

What is derived and what is fitted. Everything thermodynamic is summed from a five-species formation table: $\Delta H^{\circ$, $\Delta S}\circ$, the equilibrium constants by van 't Hoff, and the reverse rate constants, which are forced to satisfy $k_f/k_r = K_c$ rather than supplied. The only fitted inputs are the two forward Arrhenius pairs, and they come from the deck. So the equilibrium limit of this reactor is pure thermodynamics, independent of the kinetics — which is exactly what long_residence_time_approaches_thermodynamic_equilibrium measures.

Run it

cargo run --release -p deck-based-open-source-visualisation-engine-for-reactors-dover --example smr_cstr -- crates/dover/decks/smr_cstr.toml
cargo run --release -p deck-based-open-source-visualisation-engine-for-reactors-dover --example smr_cstr -- crates/dover/decks/smr_temperature_sweep.toml

Output is CSV on stdout with a stable header and fixed precision; the committed fixtures in tests/fixtures/ are regression-checked. There is no GUI and no window — DOVER is headless by construction here.

What it produces

Base deck (2 m³, 1123.15 K, 20 bar, steam-to-carbon 3, $\tau = 107$ s): methane conversion 0.4117, 1.428 mol H₂ per mol CH₄, duty 76.8 kW. Read the conversion as an overestimate: the constant-flow assumption below alone accounts for +9.6 % of it.

⚠️ Not validated, and the kinetics are placeholders

The tests are verification only — atom balances, thermodynamic consistency, the equilibrium limit, trend directions. Not one compares against an experiment or a published reformer. Specifically:

• No published kinetic parameter set is embedded. The Xu–Froment (1989) Langmuir–Hinshelwood constants are the usual choice and are deliberately not typed in, because the workspace requires any document informing the code to be catalogued in kovan-literature first, and that has not been done. The deck's forward rates are placeholders and are labelled as such in the deck itself.
• Isothermal, with the heat of reaction reported but not fed back into an energy balance. Real reforming is violently endothermic.
• Constant volumetric flow, inherited from the reactor, while reforming takes 2 mol to 4. Measured 2026-09-25: this overstates methane conversion by +9.6 % on the base deck (0.4117 here against 0.3758 from compiled upstream DWSIM, which re-flashes the gas every sweep). Handed the same Q as upstream, the reactor agrees with it to 6.1e-10, so this assumption is the entire gap.
• Power-law kinetics, no adsorption term, no catalyst, no diffusion, no pressure drop, no carbon formation.
• The formation data itself still needs cataloguing in kovan-literature.

Do not quote a number out of this as a property of any real reactor.

Build and test

cargo build --release -p deck-based-open-source-visualisation-engine-for-reactors-dover
cargo test  --release -p deck-based-open-source-visualisation-engine-for-reactors-dover --lib --tests

Bookkeeping status

Maintainer sign-off tracker (see the workspace CLAUDE.md "Bookkeeping pass" command). A crate is complete only once the maintainer has personally signed off on BOTH axes below.

Status: INCOMPLETE until both axes are manually checked and cleared by the maintainer.

Licence

GPL-3.0-only AGPL-3.0-only (relicensed 2026-10-20, gh:#973), inherited from the workspace.