SUMMARY

In the Computational Reactor/Medical Physics (CRMP) Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Coarse-Mesh Transport Method (COMET) has been developed. It has very successfully been applied to neutron transport in purely nuclear engineering related problems. The method was recently extended to the transport of photons and electrons in medical physics applications to calculate the energy deposited during radiation therapy treatment. The main goal of this work was to fully evaluate the COMET code to determine its strengths and weaknesses for medical physics application. In order to conduct this evaluation, appropriate numerical benchmarks were developed and tested. These benchmarks had varying degrees of heterogeneity within them in order to test the methodology completely They ranged from a simplified phantom composed entirely of water to a benchmarks developed from CT scans. The benchmarks also differed in mesh size as well as differing incident photon beams. Recommendations were also made for future development of the code.