Computational Solutions of Wave Problems

This is a Computational Methods course taught by Professor Botteldoorn and Professor Bogaert that uses Matlab. It is fairly well put together, though the course notes are terrible. It contains four in-class programming assignments that you are evaluated on at the end of the class, and two large programming projects, one for each professor, that you will make in a group of 2 or 3 people. The project by professor Botteldoorn is typically quite challenging and will take up a lot of your time while the project of Bogaert is less complicated. The exam of this course consists of 2 x 30 minutes of oral exam with each of the professors. With Botteldoorn, the exam mostly consists of going over the project report that you have made, together with some small extra questions. With Bogaert, you will briefly go over the project report and after that you will have to pull 5 questions that you need to answer. The questions range from rather easy calculating exercises to more difficult theoretical exercises.

Although the main part of the score obtained is determined by the in-class assignments and projects, the scores obtained can still heavily swing depending on your oral examination.

Knowing how to program in Matlab is a prerequisite of the course.

The course covers Finite Element Method, Finite Volume Method, Finite Difference Time Domain, Parabolic Equations, Integral Methods, and Ray Tracing. But only in application to wave equations. You will be working with Acoustic and Electromagnetic waves in the course, due to the fact that the Acoustic and Electromagnetic department are one in the same at UGent.

PS: the bigger question papers during Bogaert's examination are typically a matrix calculation question (eg: calculate determinant,svd and eigenvalues of a given matrix) so if you know you are good at these kinds of things it might be usefull to keep in mind.