Implementation of tetrahedral-mesh geometry in Monte Carlo radiation transport code PHITS

Furuta, Takuya; Sato, Tatsuhiko; Han, M. C.*; Yeom, Y. S.*; Kim, C. H.*; Brown, J. L.*; Bolch, W. E.*

Physics in Medicine & Biology, 62(12), p.4798 - 4810, 2017/06

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/aa6b45

A new function to treat tetrahedral-mesh geometry, a type of polygon-mesh geometry, was implemented in the Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code Systems (PHITS). Tetrahedral-mesh is suitable to describe complex geometry including curving shapes. In addition, construction of three-dimensional geometry using CAD software becomes possible with file format conversion. We have introduced a function to create decomposition maps of tetrahedral-mesh objects at the initial process so that the computational time for transport process can be reduced. Owing to this function, transport calculation in tetrahedral-mesh geometry can be as fast as that for the geometry in voxel-mesh with the same number of meshes. Due to adaptability of tetrahedrons in size and shape, dosimetrically equivalent objects can be represented by tetrahedrons with much fewer number of meshes compared with the voxels. For dosimetric calculation using computational human phantom, significant acceleration of the computational speed, about 4 times, was confirmed by adopting the tetrahedral mesh instead of the voxel.