Need some checks on the class1/class2 material modifications

For materials derived from the FuelMaterial class, a user can blend two materials together using the class1/class2 material modifications (see here). The applyInputParams method used to accomplish this could use some checks on the material modifications that are supplied by the user.

The following checks would be very useful:

1. Make sure that class1_wt_frac is between 0 and 1 (inclusive), otherwise negative isotopic densities can occur.
2. Make sure that class1_custom_isotopics and class2_custom_isotopics point to existing custom material definitions. This is very important because if the user points to a non-existing custom material, the code errors but catches an exception in the _constructMaterial call, so applyInputParams fails silently and the code continues as if nothing went wrong.

I’d be happy to implement the checks myself, if others agree that they are needed.

[keckler]

It seems like both checks could be put straight into the applyInputParams method of the FuelMaterial class. If that were the case, then the checks would run at the beginning of a case when the block blueprints are constructed. One set of checks for every FuelMaterial component in each block blueprint. So it’s not like the check would be called at every burn step, or even at every burn cycle. For a typical case that has only a handful of unique block blueprints, I don’t think it should be very onerous.

I will try to implement this and see how much overhead it requires. I have a rather big case with a lot of blueprints that I’ll test it out on.

[keckler]

Closed! Thanks for the reminder!