The Disruptive Technologies Group in the National Security Directorate of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory teamed up with students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on a research project that aims to develop quantitative methods for characterizing features in radiation transport simulation data and comparing features across different computational approaches. Understanding how radiation particles are transported throughout a system and interact with shielding is extremely computationally expensive. Reduced order models (ROMs) can be used to significantly increase the speed of these calculations. This project focuses on analysis of the simulated radiation transport for Cobalt-60, Cesium-137, and Technetium-99. A ROM may be developed from several formalisms and then analyzing the feature vectors of each. The methods considered here include principal component analysis (PCA), non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF), and CP tensor decomposition (CPT). By comparing the signal from fitted Lorentzian profiles to spectral features, we evaluate whether each ROM is capable of accurately displaying the radiation signal traces in the data
