The different neutronic parameters have to be calculated with a higher accuracy in order to design the 4th generation reactor cores. As memory storage and computation time are limited, adaptive methods are a solution to solve the neutron transport equation. The neutronic flux, solution of this equation, depends on the energy, angle and space. The different variables are successively discretized. The energy with a multigroup approach, considering the different quantities to be constant on each group, the angle by a collocation method called Sn approximation. Once the energy and angle variable are discretized, a system of spatially-dependent hyperbolic equations has to be solved. Discontinuous finite elements are used to make possible the development of $hp-$refinement methods. Thus, the accuracy of the solution can be improved by spatial refinement (h-refinement), consisting into subdividing a cell into subcells, or by order refinement (p-refinement), by increasing the order of the polynomial basis.In this thesis, the properties of this methods are analyzed showing the importance of the regularity of the solution to choose the type of refinement. Thus, two error estimators are used to lead the refinement process. Whereas the first one requires high regularity hypothesis (analytical solution), the second one supposes only the minimal hypothesis required for the solution to exist. The comparison of both estimators is done on benchmarks where the analytic solution is known by the method of manufactured solutions. Thus, the behaviour of the solution as a regard of the regularity can be studied. It leads to a hp-refinement method using the two estimators. Then, a comparison is done with other existing methods on simplified but also realistic benchmarks coming from nuclear cores.These adaptive methods considerably reduces the computational cost and memory footprint. To further improve these two points, an approach with energy-dependent meshes is proposed. Actually, as the flux behaviour is very different depending on the energy, there is no reason to use the same spatial discretization. Such an approach implies to modify the initial estimators in order to take into account the coupling between groups. This study is done from a theoretical as well as from a numerical point of view.
Analysis and development of spatial hp-refinement methods for the neutron transport equation