3 credits
Fall 2025 Lecture Upper Division
Intermediate treatment of reactor theory and its relevance to routine design engineering calculations, including introduction to transport theory, criticality evaluation, multi-group theory, isotopic depletion, and concludes with short overview of multi-level reactor design calculations, critical experiments, and treatment of neutronic uncertainties. List of Topics: Derivation of Boltzmann transport equation, and its reduction to steady state and time dependent diffusion equation. Introduction to multi-group theory, and evaluation of group parameters in both wide and narrow resonance approximations. Introduction to homogenization theory, and evaluation of lattice parameters. Evaluation of criticality condition for bare and reflected reactor geometries. Development of discretization techniques for the time-dependent multi-group diffusion theory equation. Reactor kinetics, reactivity coefficients and reactivity balance equation. Flowchart of multi-level reactor design calculations. Introduction to critical experiments and startup reactor physics test. Sources and treatment of uncertainties in reactor calculations.
Learning Outcomes1Develop an understanding of reactor physics value for engineering design calculations, and to learn how it is applied to make engineering design decision regarding material choice, composition, type, and operating conditions to sustain and control chain reactor over reactor operating horizon.
2Learn how to develop a computer code to solve a reactor physics problem.
Prerequisites
Restrictions
made by Purdue students.