Publications

Saturn Radiation Dose Environment Characterization

Ulmen, Benjamin A.; Depriest, Kendall D.; Olson, Aaron J.; Webb, Timothy J.; Edwards, Jarrod D.

To understand the environment where a time-resolved hard x-ray spectrometer (AXIOM) might be fielded, experiments and simulations were performed to analyze the radiation dose environment underneath the Saturn vacuum dome. Knowledge of this environment is critical to the design and placement of the spectrometer. Experiments demonstrated that the machine performance, at least in terms of on-axis dose, has not significantly changed over the decades. Simulations of the off-axis dose were performed to identify possible spectrometer locations of interest. The effects from the source and dome hardware as well as source distributions and angles of incidence on the radiation environment were also investigated. Finally, a unified radiation transport model was developed for two widely used radiation transport codes to investigate the off-axis dose profiles and the time-dependent x-ray energy spectrum. The demonstrated equivalence of the unified radiation transport model between the radiation transport codes allows the team to tie future time-dependent x-ray environment calculations to previous integral simulations for the Saturn facility.