Welcome to mckit-nuclides Documentation!

Note

This documentation is currently under active development.

Overview

The mckit-nuclides module provides comprehensive data and utilities for working with chemical elements and nuclides, including natural abundance information. The package is specifically designed for neutronics applications and high-performance data processing.

Key Features

  • Efficient Data Handling: Built on Polars for high-performance tabular operations

  • Natural Abundance Expansion: Tools to expand natural isotopic compositions

  • Bulk Operations: Optimized for massive datasets common in computational neutronics

  • (TODO) Format Support: Utilities for various nuclear data formats (MCNP, FISPACT, OpenMC)

Note

There’s much more mature and data rich package mendeleev. However, mckit-nuclides specializes in neutronics-oriented bulk operations and is optimized for performance with large datasets such as those generated by Rigorous 2-Step calculations. We tried pandas, sqlite, xarray for bulk operations. Polars for the moment seems the best alternative. Besides, mckit-nuclides can be used just as compact (almost no overhead) data storage to be imported to some fast database like duckdb or chDB. Eventually, we could migrate this code and data to Rust - the Polars native language.

Core Functionality

  • Expand natural isotopic abundances

  • Perform bulk operations on nuclide data

  • Join and filter large datasets efficiently

  • Convert between different composition formats

Installation

From PyPI (Recommended):

pip install mckit-nuclides

With UV Package Manager:

uv add mckit-nuclides

From Source:

pip install git+https://github.com/MC-kit/mckit-nuclides.git

Roadmap & Future Development

Todo

Move materials importing, merging, and export functionality to this package

Planned Features:

  • ☐ Parse and print MCNP composition formats (consolidating functionality from mckit, ne, pyne, f4enix)

  • ☐ Support for FISPACT composition formats

  • ☐ Support for OpenMC composition formats

  • ☐ Algorithms for composition merging by weight and atomic fractions

  • ☐ Standard composition database (similar to f4enix)

  • ☐ Mixture decomposition into standardized composition sets

API Reference

Examples

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see our GitHub repository for contribution guidelines.

Details

Indices and tables