A tool to compare several methods of computing an effective atomic number of a compound or mixture of materials.
At the moment, effective atomic numbers are computed using the following publications:
Spiers et al. 1946 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21015391/ Glasser et al. 1947 O. Glasser, Physical Foundations of Radiology, Harper, 1947. Hine et al. 1952 G.E. Hine, Secondary electrons emission and effective atomic number, Nucleonics 10 (1952) 9–15. Tsai and Cho 1976 (E < 150 keV) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/972920/ Puumalainen et al. 1977 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/598940/ Gowda et al. 2004 and Direct-Zeff 2014 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02704481 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645491300580X Champley et al. 2019 (SIRZ-2) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8638824?arnumber=8638824
Warning: Values are computed using published equations, and I tried to follow the instructions to the best of my knowledge. There is no guarantee that values match 100% with published data.
Installation:
To use the GUI program without the need for any installation, download the folder ZcompARE and run ZcompARE.exe.
How to use:
Double-click the exe program and wait for it to start. As a first choice, one can choose: 1) to compute Zeff numbers using the NIST database that has nearly 200 listed compounds or 2) create arbitrary compounds using a mass fraction of each element inside the compound. In the end, all data can be saved in excel or .csv file.
N.B. Path 2) was designed to be compatible with material files used for DukeSim CT simulation software - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30561344/