POSE: Phase II: Transitioning FESTIM into a Sustainable Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE)

Hydrogen plays a crucial role in many technological fields including aerospace and nuclear fusion. Understanding how hydrogen moves through materials is a complex challenge that affects the design, safety, and performance of key technologies, such as fusion power plants and hydrogen storage systems. Unfortunately, existing tools for modeling hydrogen transport are either proprietary, expensive, or lack the necessary basis in physics, making it difficult for researchers and engineers to access and use them. This project supports the development of FESTIM, an open-source software tool that enables accurate hydrogen transport modeling, making advanced simulation capabilities widely available to scientists, engineers, and educators. By fostering a global community of users and contributors, this project lowers barriers to innovation, supports workforce development, and accelerates scientific discovery in hydrogen-related fields. This project, funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE), establishes a self-sustaining Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) for FESTIM, ensuring its long-term usability and impact. Key activities include expanding FESTIM’s contributor community, improving developer on-boarding resources, strengthening industry and academic partnerships, and implementing governance structures to sustain future development. The project also enhances FESTIM’s usefulness through better documentation, training workshops, and an improved software distribution system. FESTIM’s development is guided by best practices in open-source software, ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and broad adoption across multiple disciplines. By providing a high-quality, community-driven modeling tool, this project empowers researchers worldwide to tackle critical challenges in hydrogen transport which will accelerate advancements in energy and materials science. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.