Speaker
Description
Staff at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), at the request of the Office of Radiological Security (ORS) within the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), identified impediments for those companies desiring to transition from cobalt-60 to an accelerator technology for processing product. One of those impediments identified was a dose simulation software tool that was much more simplified, was faster than existing commercial software, and could be run on a regular laptop. This would allow nonexperts to quickly and easily learn the basics in dose distribution in materials and the influences of gamma-rays versus electron beam and X-ray. PNNL’s answer to this tool gap was to develop PUFFIn, which stands for Penelope User Friendly Fast Interface. Unlike most other commercial dose simulation tools, PUFFIn utilize the PENELOPE radiation transport code instead of MCNP. PUFFIn was developed primarily as an educational tool, and healthcare product manufacturers and the associated sterilizer facilities were expected to be examples of the main benefactors.
The PUFFIN software package was initially released to the sterilization community in April of 2023. Workshops were held at Texas A&M University in the USA and at the Aerial CRT facility in Strasbourg France. The initial release of the code showed that with a few days training users were able to use PUFFIn to predict expected dose distribution in materials, including the minimum and maximum dose locations (i.e., dose uniformity ratio, DUR) within several polymer healthcare products.
This presentation will review the progress made in 2023 and the upgrades that were made to the PUFFIn code for the 2024 release of the software. A discussion of the comparison with experimental data will be presented, along with a discussion on improvements made to the code.
Significant upgrades that were made to the code that will be discussed include the ability to import complex 3D data sets from both CAD and X-Ray Tomography, the expansion of the number of materials supported, and the ability to run on multiple processors.
