An efficient HZETRN (a galactic cosmic ray transport code)

An accurate and efficient engineering code for analyzing the shielding requirements against the high-energy galactic heavy ions is needed. The HZETRN is a deterministic code developed at Langley Research Center that is constantly under improvement both in physics and numerical computation and is targeted for such use. One problem area connected with the space-marching technique used in this code is the propagation of the local truncation error. By improving the numerical algorithms for interpolation, integration, and grid distribution formula, the efficiency of the code is increased by a factor of eight as the number of energy grid points is reduced. The numerical accuracy of better than 2 percent for a shield thickness of 150 g/cm(exp 2) is found when a 45 point energy grid is used. The propagating step size, which is related to the perturbation theory, is also reevaluated.