Neutron Transport with Finite Differences

You are a nuclear, or a software engineer, maybe a physicist, or a nerd. This course caught your attention, would you like why? Because it is extremelly rare to find an online course on this topic. The course exposes what typical nuclear engineering students learn in a full study of nuclear engineering. There are universities where this topic is even not covered and student limit themselves to simple analytical solutions for the engineering problems or they end relying on existing private software to get results. If you are curious and you want to learn how to model nuclear reactors and compute the criticallity factor of one of them, you may want to look into the course.

This course is for those who want to learn how to solve the neutron diffusion equation in 1D, 2D and 3D using finite differences and how to model a nuclear reactor core. We use sparse matrices and the conjugate gradient method in C++ to achieve this goal. The course covers theory, coding practice and has exercises that help to improve the knowledge and retention of what we learn. We also face the multi-group theory for improving the precision in the computations of the criticality factor. On different parts of the course we validate that the software gives the right solution using analytical results from the literature.