Calculation of physical and biological dose in different organs after a solar particle event: role of shielding conditions
Abstract
Distributions of physical and "biological" doses in different organs after a solar- particle event (SPE) were calculated by coupling a purposely modified version of the FLUKA Monte Carlo transport code with a human phantom. The phantom, which was assumed to be in deep space, was inserted in a shielding box of variable thickness and material and was irradiated with available spectra of SPEs occurred in the past decades. The "biological" dose was modelled by adopting a technique already tested in previous works, consisting in integrating into "condensed-history" codes - such as FLUKA - yields of radiobiological damage, either calculated with "event-by-event" track structure simulations, or taken from experimental works available in the literature. In the present work, damage yields due to the various beam components (including those derived from nuclear interactions with both the shielding structures and the human body) were integrated in FLUKA. This provided spatial distributions of biological damage in different organs, besides distributions of physical dose. Repetition of the simulations in different shielding conditions allowed us to quantify the role of the shielding features in modulating organ dose distributions. Secondary particles were found to play an important role, especially in the case of biological dose, for which, in particular conditions, the contribution of secondary particles can be higher than that of primary protons.
- Publication:
-
34th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- 2002
- Bibcode:
- 2002cosp...34E1502B