The visualization of 3D nuclear radiation dose field

Highlights: • The dose of nuclear radiation is invisible and intangible, increasing the difficulty of nuclear protection. • Ray-casting based volume rendering shows the internal details of the radiation dose in the nuclear power plants. • Interactive visualization system provides operations to better show the distribution of radiation dose. • The dynamic visualization of nuclear radiation leakage supports the protection design of nuclear power plant. The nuclear energy is widely used as a new energy source due to the increasing depletion of fossil fuels. In the development of nuclear energy and technology, people are paying more and more attention to the issue of nuclear radiation protection. As a result, advanced computer technology has become a new way to solve nuclear radiation safety issues. This paper proposes to utilize CUDA-based ray-casting volume rendering to build an interactive nuclear radiation visualization system to solve the nuclear radiation safety problems, such as the judgment of radiation dose leakage and the planning of construction path. The system includes three modules, which are the overall dose rate distribution display of multiple power plants, the dose view of a specific equipment in power plants, and the dynamic evolution of nuclear radiation leakage. The analysis and user feedbacks of the experimental results show that this interactive visualization system can present the nuclear dose distribution of power plant in real time and from different granularities. This system utilizes the color mapping schema that as the dose density increases, the color changes from green to red, which is in line with human visual perception. Meanwhile, the dynamic radiation leakage scenario view is assistant to the design of nuclear radiation protection.