The transport behaviors of proton into nanoporous materials were investigated using different Monte Carlo simulation codes such as GEANT4, Deeper and SRIM. The results indicated that porous structure could enhance the proton scattering effects due to a higher specific surface area and more boundaries. The existence of voids can deepen and widen the proton distribution in the targets due to relatively lower apparent density. Thus, the incident protons would transport deeper and form a wider Bragg peak in the end of the range, as the target materials are in a higher porosity state and/or have a larger pore size. The existence of voids also causes the local inhomogeneity of proton/energy distribution in micro/nano scales. As compared, the commonly used SRIM code can only be used to estimate roughly the incident proton range in nanoporous materials, based on a homogeneous apparent density equivalence rule. Moreover, the estimated errors of the proton range tend to increase with the porosity. The Deeper code (designed for evaluation of radiation effects of nuclear materials) can be used to simulate the transport behaviors of protons or heavy ions in a real porous material with porosity smaller than 52.3% due to its modeling difficulty, while the GEANT4 code has shown advantages in that it is suitable and has been proven to simulate proton transportation in nanoporous materials with porosity in its full range of 0~100%. The GEANT4 simulation results are proved consistent with the experimental data, implying compatibility to deal with ion transportation into homogeneously nanoporous materials.
Keywords: GEANT4 code; Monte Carlo; nanoporous matter; proton; transport behavior.