3DGShield: A new 3D gamma ray shielding code for arbitrary source and shield geometry based on point kernel technique.

3DGShield, A new 3D gamma ray shielding code, based on the method of point kernel technique, has been developed for arbitrary regular & irregular shaped source and shield geometries. The 3D geometry modeling and its mesh generation are performed using Gmsh, a free open source finite element mesh generation software. The output of the Gmsh software is in Gmsh MSH (.msh) file format which will be used as an input of geometry description of our code. The salient features of 3DGShield are (i) ability to handle any type of complex source geometries including regular source shapes like point, line, disc, box, cylinder, sphere, hexagonal cylinder, cone etc. and irregular source shapes like pieces of broken glass, piece of brick etc., (ii) handling discrete as well as distributed photon energy sources, (iii) modeling any kind of regular and irregular complex multilayered shield geometries, (iv) having provision to export the output results into ParaView, an open source data analysis and visualization software, for quick visualization and analyzing of the results. Buildup factor is the correction factor which takes account the contribution of scattered photon. Various appropriate multilayer build-up factor formulas have been incorporated in our code. Out of these, the most popular methods are Blizard's method, Goldstein method of an effective atomic number and Broders's method. Verification and validation of the code have been done by a number of benchmark problems available in literature. The results are presented in this paper which demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the code in complex geometries. This code is written in Python-2.7 language and compatible both in Windows and Linux operating system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]