Speaker
Description
Accelerator-based Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (AB-BNCT) requires coordinated monitoring and safety evaluation across proton beam delivery, high-heat-flux target cooling, and the beam shaping assembly (BSA). While high-fidelity numerical simulations—such as MCNP6 for radiation transport and COMSOL Multiphysics for conjugate heat transfer—provide detailed physical insights, single-case evaluations typically require tens of minutes to hours, limiting their direct use in online operational assessment.
In this contribution, we present the conceptual design and prototyping progress of a layered EPICS-integrated Digital Twin framework for the BNCT facility under development at Nanjing University. Rather than replacing standard control protocols, the proposed architecture utilizes EPICS Channel Access / PVAccess (CA/PVA) and Python-based virtual IOCs to orchestrate decoupled back-end physics model services.
Specifically, for the target station, we model a 14 MeV proton beam impinging on a stratified Be-Li composite target backed by a spiral water-cooled copper heat sink. Offline multi-physics datasets—capturing 3D Bragg-peak energy deposition under various beam spot profiles (e.g., uniform vs. Gaussian distributions) and spiral-channel thermal-hydraulic performance—are structured to build rapid-evaluation thermal surrogate models, while downstream BSA neutron spectrum estimation interfaces with the group's physically constrained Energy Spectrum Superposition Method–Machine Learning (ESSM-ML) algorithm.
By subscribing to both upstream beam parameters (current, energy, spot profile) and coolant loop PVs (flow rate, inlet temperature, pressure drop), the twin service provides model-based virtual diagnostics for internal states that are difficult to measure directly online, such as peak lithium and wet-wall temperatures against melting and cavitation limits.
In the current pre-commissioning stage, this framework supports non-intrusive virtual commissioning and parasitic (shadow-mode) software testing for target thermal-safety alarm logic and beam-target matching prior to hardware integration.
