Radioactive Decay using Eulers Method

A PROJECT REPORT SUBMITTED TO

GD GOENKA UNIVERSITY, GURGAON
FOR THE AWARD OF MSE II OF NUMERICAL METHODS
(MAT2002L)

School of Engineering
Department of Computer Science Engineering

Submitted to:
Dr. Naresh Sharma
Dept. of Basic & Applied Sciences
School of Engineering

Submitted by:
Gyanshu Azad Singh
140020203059
B.Tech. CSE, 4th Semester

INDEX
1. INTRODUCTION
2. ALGORITHM AND DISCUSSION
3. IMPLEMENTATION CODE
4. CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION
When a sample of material contains a significant population of radioactive nuclei, its
possible to measure the rate at which that population changes. It has been observed
that the rate of change of the number of radioactive nuclei is proportional to the
number remaining in the sample. In other words if we represent the number of
remaining nuclei as s then:
The objective of this project is to solve this equation, both analytically and
numerically, in order to compare these results and thereby improve our confidence in
our understanding of the system and its behaviour.
This problem is interesting and useful because it is a concrete application of Eulers
Algorithm to a real world problem for which the algorithm gives excellent results.

Algorithm and Discussion

Applying Eulers Method to this problem is pretty easy, we can simply
approximate the derivative as a ratio of finite changes

We can then solve this for

as:

These can then be accumulated to get the value of s at any time. We need to
take care that
is small enough that s doesnt change a lot in a single time
step as this would violate the spirit (and correctness!) of the approximation.
The exact solution to the decay equation can be found by simple calculus:

Which immediately gives:

Since this is easily computed it can be compared to the result of Eulers

Algorithm.

Implementation Code
Example:
The basic equation for modelling radioactive decay is given by dx/dt= -rx where x is
the amount of radioactive decay at time t, and r is the decay rate. Assume that at time
zero, you have 100 atoms of strontium 92 which decays at a rate of 0.01 atoms/sec.
How many atoms of strontium 92 will be left after 100 seconds? Use Euler's method
to approximate the answer. Work in step of h = 1. Also compute the answer using the
formula x(t) = x0*e^(-rt).
Program:

OUTPUT

CONCLUSION

Above is a graph between number of nuclei remaining vs time. Its clear that its
doing something fairly reasonable since the exact solution appears to be very close to
the numerical value. The percent difference between the exact value and the
numerical solution is about 0.5% even after 100 seconds.
In this investigation it was discovered that Eulers Method can be a very simple yet
effective method of investigating the solution to an important differential equation
that has a concrete application in a real world problem. Eulers Method in this case
was reasonably accurate (less that 1% deviation from the exact solution) and fast (run
time was not really noticeable in this calculation). It was noticed that the time step
needs to be fairly small to get these good results so that the number of nuclei doesnt
change a lot in a single time step.