USERWEIG

From: Alberto Fasso' (fasso@SLAC.Stanford.EDU)
Date: Mon Oct 15 2007 - 15:04:20 CEST

  • Next message: Stefan Roesler: "Re: USRTRACK & Dose"

    I get the following message from Thomas Otto. See my answer below.

    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:39:59 +0200
    From: "Thomas Otto, SC-RP" <thomas.otto@cern.ch>
    To: Alberto Fasso' <fasso@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>
    Subject: Score 208

    Dear Alberto,

    I see that you are presently very active in answering e-mails on fluence and
    such.
    In the same ballbark, I have a remark concerning the manual: in the description
    of USERWEIG, it states that a function call to comscw.f with What(6) = 1.0 will
    also influence SCORE. I made recently a test, and this does not seem to be the
    case. An absorbed energy binning (208) in USRBIN was converted into absorbed
    dose, but the results under SCORE remined unaffected by comscw.f .

    Anotyhe remark on the same command: the description of the use of WHAT(3 or 6)
    > 2.0 is not very clear, I cannot understand the use of applying this. Is it
    meant to be a timesaver by not calling a comscw-routine for a fluence estimator
    ?

    If you think the answers to these qustions are of general interest, you can
    post them on the fluka-list.

    Best regards, Thomas

    -- 
    Thomas Otto
    Individual Dosimetry Service
    Radiation Protection PS Complex
    SC-RP
    CERN
    CH 1211 Geneve 23
    Tel. (+41 22) 76 73272
    Fax. (+41 22) 76 79360
    thomas.otto@cern.ch
    http://cern.ch/rp-dosimetry
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    You are right, SCORE is not affected by comscw.f. It used to be affected in a 
    very distant past (that is why the error in the manual), but for some reason
    that now nobody can recall this feature was abandoned.
    It is not a very important loss: you can obtain the same result by
    using "region binning" (USRBIN with WHAT(1) = 2). But I will correct the
    manual, of course.
    Concerning your second question (USERWEIG with WHAT(3) or WHAT(6) > 2),
    also here is a weakness of the manual that must be corrected (it says
    "see Note below", but the Note doesn't exist!).
    The meaning is the following:
    case 1) If the comscw.f or fluscw.f routine is used in a simple way, namely
    just to multiply the score by a factor (this happens in 99% of the cases!), it
    would be a waste of cpu time to evaluate the value of the function even
    when a detector or a binning are not affected by the current score.
    Setting WHAT(3) or WHAT(6) > 2 makes the program to evaluate the
    function only when it after making sure that a particular detector gets that
    score. 
    case 2) But there are cases where the function is used for some "trick", not 
    only to get a multiplication factor, but to obtain a side effect at a
    boundary crossing or at scoring time. The logics can be very complex
    and it is impossible to foresee. In this case, the evaluation is done
    before knowing if there is scoring or not in a particular detector, because
    that is not necessarily the trigger the user wants.
    I must admit that the default should better be the first case, and not the
    second. But unfortunately the code has been historically developed in this way
    and to change the default now could have bad effects on the legacy input
    of some user.
    I take this opportunity to point out that the fluence-to-dose equivalent
    conversion routine deq99 of Stefan Roesler, widely used in shielding
    calculations, should better be used as in case 1, unless a binning is
    used to cover the whole geometry (as it is now often the case to produce
    color plots). And not surprisingly, it was on Stefan's request that
    that the case 1 feature was added.
    Alberto
    

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