Speaker
Description
Radiation detection is nowadays a complex and very important field with applications across areas such as medicine, homeland security, environmental monitoring, nuclear reactor control, well logging, high energy physics and large area detectors in neutron research facilities, among others. The development of alternative systems for radiation detection that present versatility of applications, of easy production and manipulation with viable costs has been the focus of many recent studies. In particular, neutron detection plays a key role in the detection of special nuclear materials, 233U, 235U and 239Pu- to avoid traffic of such materials.
With the shortage of Helium 3, long considered the gold standard for neutron detection, significant efforts have been made through the years to find materials suitable for replacing the 3He counters. Organic scintillators are a viable alternative, as they are relatively easy to produce, cost effective and can be manufactured in large sizes and formats, —unlike inorganic crystals. Plastic scintillators present several advantages over liquids or crystal, as they are more versatile than crystals, easier to produce and with lower costs and have much lower toxicity than the liquids.
We have considered the possibility of having boron nanoparticles uniformly mixed inside a plastic scintillator. However, this approach proved to be challenging due to the difficulty of undergoing the long cure process while preventing the nanoparticle deposition at the bottom side of the scintillator. As an alternative, we investigated the use of organic molecules, having boron in its composition, which could be soluble in the scintillator matrix.
This work presents the study and development of plastic scintillators for fast and thermal neutron detection. We envisaged materials that could lead to a low-cost plastic scintillator with lower curing temperatures and faster curing cycles compared to current standards. We pursued the production of plastic scintillators with pulse shape discrimination capabilities and the incorporation of different compounds containing Boron into the scintillator matrix, using homogeneous and heterogeneous methods. The most recent results of these developments are presented in this work.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the FCT, Lisbon.
[1] M. Koshimizu, Recent progress of organic scintillators, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 62 (2023) 010503; DOI 10.35848/1347-4065/ac94fe
[2] I.A. Pawełczak et al., Boron-loaded plastic scintillator with neutron-γ pulse shape discrimination capability, Nucl. Instrum Meth. A 751 (2014) 62–69; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2014.03.027
| Workshop topics | Sensor materials, device processing & technologies |
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