Engineering Commons^™

Modeling Pressurized Water Reactor Kinetics, William H. Harman

Theses and Dissertations

A computer model of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) was developed for use as a teaching tool in graduate level nuclear reactor courses. The development, based on the diffusion equation, includes the methodology for solving the steady state spatial dependence of the neutron power output in a homogeneous right circular cylinder unreflected PWR system. This includes a two dimensional one energy group model, a three dimensional one energy group model, and a three dimensional two energy group model. To solve the homogeneous diffusion equation, a method was developed to search for criticality of the reactor based on the geometry and …