COUPLE Tutorial with Explanations (for beginners)

[Jordan A]

Attached is a file that walks you though how COUPLE works, what it's doing, how to understand the arrays, and how to use it. When I first started with ORIGEN, I spent quite a while trying to figure out COUPLE. I hope this helps anybody in a similar situation in the future.

[Weicheng Zhong]

Thank you Jordan, I found this post very helpful for me get started on the ORIGEN calculation. And I have a question related to the script that you uploaded.

For your case{irr}, you specify the neutron flux spectrum using the COUPLE. Do you think the flux spectrum can be plotted from the output file?

Plotting the spectrum will help me to confirm that the spectrum is what I wanted (this will also related to your another post (Fluxes with COUPLE and ORIGEN - theory and application)

I have tried to used opus to plot the spectrum using the following script(_Act.f71 is file that your script saved), but the output flux is zero at all energy.  I guess the opus can only plot the neutron spectrum from the fissile materials using ARP module, and if stainless steel is the only material, opus will not be able user-specified spectrum?

=opus

data="_Act.f71"

typarams=nspe

units=intensity

end

[Jordan A]

I'm not sure how to plot that. I tried following the manual to use opus, and it didn't quite do what I wanted. You can also just use excel to do this, putting energy across one axis and flux in the other. That's how I ended up seeing it.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you--my life essentially fell apart, and I'm barely keeping it together.

[Weicheng Zhong]

Jordan, Thank you for your reply. That's what I am doing now to use excel to plot the spectrum

I am sorry to hear your life falling apart and I hope everything will go well soon!

Thank you for your reply.