SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Residual radiation caused by activation radioactive isotopes can stay in facilities, on instruments and clothes from several days to many years and there is a need to have a tool for automatic simulation of 3D residual dose distributions in time. Examples are accelerator enclosures, nuclear plants, fusion and nuclear medicine facilities. Several welltested highfidelity Monte Carlo codes can be used to perform such simulations, but they include many “manual” programming and integration tasks. Moreover, they often use approximate representation of complex CAD geometries and lack a userfriendly interface allowing users to set up and execute the required workflows in a streamlined and errorproof fashion. TechX Corporation, in collaboration with SLAC and FNAL, will develop a framework for streamlined calculation of residual dose using MARS15 and Geant4 Monte Carlo codes. The framework will allow definition of complex geometries from CAD and have a Graphical User Interface GUI to set up simulations without the programming knowledge and manual editing of the input files and to run simulations on a variety of computing resources. In Phase I TechX developed 1 software for translating CAD to MARS15 and Geant4 inputs; 2 extensions of MARS15 and Geant4 to increase automation of residual dose calculations; 3 a prototype Graphical User Interface for to set and visualize such simulations. TechX will develop standalone software libraries and commandline tools for 1 translating CAD into tessellated surfaces and tetrahedral meshes in GDML for Geant4 and MARS15, ROOT for MARS15 and HDF5 for compact representation and for the visualization formats, 2 healing CAD geometries to make them suitable for Monte Carlo simulations; 3 creating unform and variable Cartesian and cylindrical meshes for detailed scoring; and 4 efficient Monte Carlo navigation in CAD geometries. FNAL and SLAC will finish automation of simulations of residual dose in CAD geometries and integrate TechX software into Geant4 and MARS15. Finally, TechX will develop a Graphical User Interface to set up and heal CAD geometries, create input files, run and visualize simulations for residual dose. This application will run on local desktops, local and remote clusters and supercomputers and will be made available through public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services. The developed application will be of immediate use to the US National Laboratories doing research in HighEnergy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Nuclear Energy, Fusion, and Nonproliferation: FNAL, SLAC, ORNL, SNS, BNL, and PPPL. Commercial applications include aerospace, nuclear energy, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy applications and nuclear waste management in these sectors.
