Estimating Radiation Dose with Ray Tracing in Ansys Charge Plus Software

This tutorial demonstrates how to estimate radiation dose on shielded electronic components using the ray-tracing dose estimation tool in Ansys Charge Plus™ electromagnetic charging and discharge simulation software.

Using a simplified satellite model that contains a printed circuit board enclosed within a thin metallic housing, you will assign materials, define ray-tracing detectors, and import dose-depth curves to compute dose maps on selected board surfaces.

The workflow highlights how geometry shielding, material density, and ray sampling influence dose estimation, and concludes with visualizing dose contours using Graphite tools. This tutorial serves as an introduction to radiation dose assessment and is not intended to replace full particle transport simulations.

Learning Outcomes:

Following completion of this tutorial, you will be able to:

• Understand the purpose of ray-tracing dose estimation in Ansys Charge Plus software.
• Load and work with a base satellite model.
• Assign appropriate material properties for dose calculations.
• Identify which material parameters are relevant for ray tracing (e.g., density).
• Create ray tracing detectors on surfaces of interest.
• Import and apply dose depth curve data for a specified radiation environment.
• Configure ray tracing solver parameters, including rays per mesh element.
• Run a ray tracing dose estimation analysis.
• Visualize and interpret dose maps using Graphite contour plots.