Nuclear Engineering Commons^™

Stochastic Methods For Uncertainty Quantification In Radiation Transport, Erin D. Fichtl

Nuclear Engineering ETDs

The use of stochastic spectral expansions, specifically generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) and Karhunen-Loeve (KL) expansions, is investigated for uncertainty quantification in radiation transport. The gPC represents second-order random processes in terms of an expansion of orthogonal polynomials of random variables. The KL expansion is a Fourier-type expansion that represents a second-order random process with known covariance function in terms of a set of uncorrelated random variables and the eigenmodes of the covariance function. The flux and, in multiplying materials, the k-eigenvalue, which are the problem unknowns, are always expanded in a gPC expansion since their covariance functions are also unknown. …