I am taking four classes this semester.
Physics 401
This is a survey class of various energy technologies. Mostly interesting, incredibly easy. Not much to say about it.
Nuclear Systems Design
This is a design based class where we are focusing on creating non-destructive techniques to analyze steam generators for defects. A steam generator is the heat exchanger from the primary coolant which is radioactive and the secondary coolant which drives the turbines in a reactor and contains over 3,000 tubes. Currently a probe is run through each tube (eddy current testing); our idea is to induce vibrations in the tube and record the response of the tubes, hopefully doing an array of tubes at a time. This class is a little dry at times, but the design aspect is very interesting. We will be presenting our design at the ANS (American Nuclear Society) Conference in April.
Maintainability and Reliability Engineering
This class is once a week for 2.5 hours. That is a drag. Otherwise it is very interesting; currently we are learning about signal processing.
Industrial Mathematics
An applied mathematics course. So far it has been very simple (Labs were to implement Newton's Method and Euler), but it looks like it could pick up rapidly. While it is nice to get a better mathematical background on these methods, I originally thought that the class would be more focused on applying methods already written to harder problems. I just don't see the point in writing a Newton Solver / Euler when there are plenty of methods available.
Masters Thesis
Final "class" is thesis. This is coming along quite nicely; I might have finally picked up MCNPX. This also has to be finished by April; we submitted an abstract to the ANS conference.
No comments:
Post a Comment