PARSO—Particle-packing and radiation shielding optimizer: A user-friendly software tool for fostering the discovery of high-performance radiation-shielding materials

The development of effective radiation shielding materials requires both accurate shielding analysis and optimized material design. To address this fundamental prerequisite, we developed PARSO—the Pa rticle-Packing and R adiation S hielding O ptimizer—a computational software tool publicly available at https://parso.netlify.app/ . PARSO uniquely integrates an extensive range of latest gamma as well as fast- and thermal-neutron shielding databases, including NIST X-ray, XCOM, ENDF/B-VIII.0, ENDF/B-VIII.1, TENDL-2023, JENDL-5, and JEFF-3.3. This allows for accurate calculation of key shielding parameters across a breadth of energy ranges, including gamma mass attenuation coefficients; neutron total, absorption, and removal mass cross-sections; mean free path; half-value and tenth-value layers; and effective and equivalent atomic numbers. In addition to shielding analysis, PARSO incorporates advanced particle packing optimization based on particle size distributions of individual materials. Most notably, the software leverages multi-core parallel computing to efficiently evaluate thousands of material combination and proportions, enabling the identification of compositions with both optimal radiation shielding and particle packing for improved mechanical performance. PARSO is stands as a unique software tool that combines mixture optimization with radiation physics principles. Comparisons of PARSO's results with experimental radiation shielding data and theoretical results from the literature demonstrate PARSO's high accuracy given its use of the latest nuclear data libraries and empirical modeling. Supported by both a multicore processing and a user-friendly graphical interface, PARSO promises expediting the discovery of advanced radiation-shielding materials for safer and more secure nuclear facilities.