Blue Capsule accelerates the development of its nuclear reactor with Aletiq

In summary

By using Aletiq, Blue Capsule can:

✓ Ensure compliance with nuclear regulations (ISO 9001, 19443...)

✓ Ensuring the digital continuity of low-level nomenclature requirements

✓ Benefit from a visual design tool to design the reactor architecture

✓ Test and validate architecture and design parameters 3x faster

✓ Halve design cycles through real-time collaboration on Solidworks

✓ Ensuring data security in line with requirements related to sovereign industries

A newcomer to the energy transition, Blue Capsule is designing a next-generation modular nuclear reactor for industrial sites.

In the race to reduce CO2 emissions, large industrial sites need clean, stable and safe sources of heat and electricity. Blue Capsule reactors provide up to 150 MWth of industrial heat at 700°C, 50MW of electricity or high-temperature steam.

The company has won the France 2030 “Innovative Nuclear Reactors” program and is supported by leading private investors.

Operational challenges

The development of a nuclear reactor includes a very advanced phase of architecture and specification of requirements. Blue Capsule therefore sought a PLM solution that integrated functionalities early in the product development cycle.

In addition, the teams develop numerous competing designs by varying the multiple engineering parameters. These configuration options must be able to be iterated, tested, validated, validated, rejected, or reconciled simply to be able to accelerate development cycle times.

Finally, Blue Capsule works with several research or industrial partners (CNRS, CEA, EGIS, Elyse Technology...) and was looking for a solution that would allow it to collaborate simply with external entities.

Setting up Aletiq

At the start of the project, the Aletiq teams went to the Aix en Provence site to:

→ Understand the needs related to the PLM solution in the context of the development of a nuclear reactor

→ Co-build with the teams the processes of development, proposal of a competing design, and validation and configure them in Aletiq

→ Retrieve all the company's historical technical data

After 2 weeks of setting up the platform and loading historical data, the Aletiq teams returned to the site to train designers, architects, quality specialists, project managers and launch the use of the Product Platform.

The adoption of teams

The adoption by the teams was extremely rapid for several reasons:

• The ergonomics and ease of use of the solution greatly speed up handling
• Aletiq is in charge of transferring all the historical technical data, allowing the teams to resume their work where they left off
• The speed of deployment allows teams to see operational gains in a few weeks, which naturally encourages them to work on the platform.

The Blue Capsule operational teams thus quickly took charge of the solution. Architects control the systems, specifications, and parameters in the tool. The Design Office manages the design and CAD data using the Aletiq x Solidworks plugin. The Project team shares data with partners (subcontractors, research institutes) directly from the platform.