URANOS -- a novel voxel engine Neutron Transport Monte-Carlo Simulation

TL;DR

URANOS is a user-friendly 3D neutron transport Monte-Carlo simulation tool with a voxel engine, designed for small to medium projects, featuring fast computation, an intuitive GUI, and detailed physics modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel voxel-based Monte-Carlo neutron transport engine with an accessible GUI, enabling efficient simulations of complex geometries for small to medium-sized projects.

Findings

Supports detailed neutron transport physics including elastic, inelastic, and absorption processes.

Models charged particle transport in boron-lined detectors.

Provides a fast, accessible simulation workflow for environmental and detector response studies.

Abstract

URANOS is a newly developed 3D neutron transport Monte-Carlo code from thermal to fast energy domains. It was originally developed for the CASCADE detector. The purpose of this simulation program is to provide a fast computational workflow and an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for small to medium-sized projects. It features a ray-casting algorithm based on a voxel engine. The simulation domain is defined layerwise, whereas the geometry is extruded from a pixel matrix of materials, identified by specific numbers. Input files are a stack of pictures, all other settings, including the configuration of predefined sources, can be adjusted via the GUI. The scattering kernel features the treatment of elastic and inelastic collisions, absorption and absorption-like processes like evaporation. Cross sections, energy distributions and angular distributions are taken from evaluated data bases. In order to simulate boron-lined detectors it also models the charged particle transport following the conversion by computing the energy loss in the boron and its consecutive layer. The electron track is then projected onto a readout unit by longitudinal and transversal diffusion. URANOS is freely available and can be used to simulate the response function of boron-lined or epithermal neutron detectors, small-scale laboratory setups and especially transport studies of cosmic-ray induced environmental neutrons. It offers an easy accessibility and comparably simple interface capable of handling complex geometries. URANOS therefore offers possibilities to understand and simulate the neutron environment at instruments, which would otherwise require extensive modeling and training on dedicated packages.