• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제54권12호
• /
• pp.4422-4430
• /
• 2022

Studying the effects of gamma radiation on the instrumentation and control (I&C) system of a nuclear power plant is critical to the successful and reliable operation of the plant. In the accidental scenario, the adverse environment of ionizing radiation affects the performance of the I&C system and it leads to inaccurate and incomprehensible results. This paper reports the effects of gamma radiation on the AT89C51RD2, a commercial-off-the-shelf 8-bit high-performance flash microcontroller. The microcontroller, selected for the device under test for this study is used in the remote terminal unit for a nuclear power plant. The custom circuits were made to test the microcontroller under different gamma doses using a ⁶⁰Co gamma source in both ex-situ and in-situ modes. The device was exposed to a maximum dose of 1.5 kGy. Under this hostile environment, the performance of the microcontroller was studied in terms of device current and voltage changes. It was observed that the microcontroller device can operate up to a total absorbed dose of approximately 0.6 kGy without any failure or degradation in its performance.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제56권1호
• /
• pp.56-63
• /
• 2024

In high radiation fields, gamma cameras suffer from pulse pile-up, resulting in poor energy resolution, count losses, and image distortion. To overcome this problem, various methods have been introduced to reduce the size of the aperture or pixel, reject the pile-up events, and correct the pile-up events, but these technologies have limitations in terms of mechanical design and real-time processing. The purpose of this study is to develop a real-time gamma camera to evaluate the radioactive contamination in high radiation fields. The gamma camera is composed of a pinhole collimator, NaI(Tl) scintillator, position sensitive photomultiplier (PSPMT), signal processing board, and data acquisition (DAQ). The pulse pile-up is corrected in real-time with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) using the start time correction (STC) method. The STC method corrects the amplitude of the pile-up event by correcting the time at the start point of the pile-up event. The performance of the gamma camera was evaluated using a high dose rate ¹³⁷Cs source. For pulse pile-up ratios (PPRs) of 0.45 and 0.30, the energy resolution improved by 61.5 and 20.3%, respectively. In addition, the image artifacts in the ¹³⁷Cs radioisotope image due to pile-up were reduced.

• 방사선산업학회지
• /
• 제17권3호
• /
• pp.219-224
• /
• 2023

A high-efficiency underwater radiation monitoring system, HydroGamma, has been developed for detecting ¹³⁷Cs and ¹³¹I in the event of waterborne radiation contamination. The system consists of a 3-inch NaI (Tl) detector, solar panels for power supply, data acquisition and transmission modules, and batteries. HydroGamma also includes a ⁴⁰K calibration source for remote performance evaluation and energy calibration. In this study, some simulations and experiments were carried out to evaluate the minimum detectable activities (MDA) of HydroGamma. We installed the HydroGamma at Tapjeongho Lake in Nonsan-si and acquired background data since MDA is calculated based on the experimental background data. The results show that the minimum detectable activities for ¹³⁷Cs and ¹³¹I were 1.78Bq L^-1 and 1.81Bq L^-1, respectively even though the gamma rays emitted from ⁴⁰K(1,460 keV) affect the minimum detectable activities for them.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제56권10호
• /
• pp.3993-4006
• /
• 2024

Compton imaging excels at visualizing gamma rays in the range of several hundred kiloelectronvolts to several megaelectronvolts. However, this technique has limitations in the imaging of low-energy gamma rays. In contrast, collimatorless imaging technique determines the location of a source by analyzing the distribution of interactions. Because the collimatorless imaging technique excels at imaging low-energy gamma rays that are easily shielded by detector components, it can compensate for the shortcomings of the Compton imaging technique. In this study, we propose a dual-mode imaging technique that selects the imaging method depending on the target gamma-ray energy and fuses them during reconstruction. The collimatorless imaging method demonstrated high angular resolution at low energy levels, whereas the Compton image surpasses it starting from 200 keV within its reconstructible range. The angular resolution of the dual-mode image was between those of the two methods. The trend of the positional error of gamma ray energy was similar to that of the angular resolution, and the dual-mode method exhibited the lowest average error of 0.7°. The dual imaging method exhibited higher efficiency, figure of merit, and signal-to-noise ratio by utilizing events from both imaging modalities. In addition, we investigated the geometrical effects of various structures.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• 제1권1호
• /
• pp.75-78
• /
• 1991

The carotenoid biosynthesis of a red oleaginous yeast, Rhodotorula glutinis was significantly changed when the yeast was grown on different carbon substrates. The highest carotenoid production was obtained on culture medium containing glucose when the carbon to nitrogen ratio (C/N ratio) was adjusted to 25.7. Galactose stimulated the biosynthetic rate of torularhodin, a xanthophyll component of the yeast. With decreasing C/N ratio of the medium, significant changes of $\gamma$-carotene and torularhodin were observed such that increase in the torularhodin concentration was nearly equal to the decrease in $\gamma$-carotene. It was speculated that the nature of carbon substrate affected the metabolic rate of the cell, and accompanied by the different pattern of carotenoid accumulation in the cell.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
• /
• 제34권3호
• /
• pp.144-150
• /
• 2009

This study examines how much the radiation dose rate around it varies if a crack occurs on the spent nuclear fuel rod. The spent nuclear fuel rod to be examined is that of Kori unit 3&4. The source terms are evaluated using the ORIGEN-ARP that is part of the version 5.1 of the SCALE package. The radiation dose rate is assessed using the TORT. To check if the structure of a fuel rod is appropriately modeled in the TORT calculation, the calculation results by the TORT are compared with those by the ANISN for the same case. From the code simulation, it is known that if a crack occurs on the spent nuclear fuel rod, the neutron dose rate varies depending on what material is the crack filled with, but the gamma dose rate varies irrespective of type of the material that the crack is filled with.

• 한국조명전기설비학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국조명전기설비학회 2009년도 춘계학술대회 논문집
• /
• pp.243-247
• /
• 2009

A Radioactive constraint of the nuclear fuel assembly irradiated by neutron during normal operation cycle of the nuclear power plant is typically on the order of about 3 kGy/h. In order to inspect nuclear fuel assembly using a VT (vision technology) system, the light such as halogen lamp is used. As the halogen lamp has lower color temperature than the sun light, the objects under halogen lamp illumination are seemed to be tinted with red. In this paper, high brightness LED is considered to be used as the light source of VT system. The high brightness LED, which is a key light source of the VT system, have been gamma irradiated at the dose rate of 4 kGy/h during two hours up to a total dose of 8 kGy. The radiation induced color-center in the LED housing cap made of plastics materials is observed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제51권2호
• /
• pp.526-532
• /
• 2019

In this study, an in-house $^{152}Eu$ calibration source was produced from a custom epoxy matrix with a density of ${\rho}=1.14g\;cm^{-3}$, which is chemically stable and durable form after its solidification. The homogeneity of $^{152}Eu$ in matrix was obtained better than 98%. For a Marinelli beaker geometry, an efficiency calibration procedure was applied to a n-type, coaxial, 78.5% relative efficient HPGe detector in the energy range of 121.7-1408.0 keV by using in-house $^{152}Eu$ calibration source. Then the measured efficiencies for Marinelli geometry were compared with the results calculated by MEFFTRAN and ANGLE softwares for the validation. Although MEFFTRAN and ANGLE have two different efficiency transfer algorithms to calculate the efficiencies, they usually need to use a reliable and accurate reference efficiency values as input data. Hence, reference efficiency values were obtained experimentally from a multinuclide standard source for the same detector-Marinelli geometry. In the present source characterization, the corrections required for self-absorption and true coincidence summing effects for $^{152}Eu$ gamma-rays were also obtained for a such close counting geometry condition. The experimental results confirmed the validity of efficiency calculations obtained by MEFFTRAN and ANGLE softwares that are calculation tools.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• 제31권5호
• /
• pp.604-606
• /
• 2009

The primary dose effects on an insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) irradiated with a $^{60}Co$ gamma-ray source are found in both of the components of the threshold shifting due to oxide charge trapping in the MOS and the reduction of current gain in the bipolar transistor. In this letter, the IGBT macro-model incorporating irradiation is implemented, and the electrical characteristics are analyzed by SPICE simulation and experiments. In addition, the collector current characteristics as a function of gate emitter voltage, VGE, are compared with the model considering the radiation damage of different doses under positive biases.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
• /
• 제42권1호
• /
• pp.16-20
• /
• 2017

Background: The design of deuteron accelerator neutron source facilities requires reliable yield estimation of gamma-rays as well as neutrons from deuteron-induced reactions. We have so foar measured systematically double-differential thick target neutron yields (DDTTNYs) for carbon, aluminum, titanium, copper, niobium, and SUS304 targets. In the neutron data analysis, the events of gamma-rays taken simultaneously were treated as backgrounds. In the present work, we have re-analyzed the experimental data for a thick carbon target with particular attention to gamma-ray events. Materials and Methods: Double-differential thick target gamma-ray yields from carbon irradiated by 5 and 9 MeV deuterons were measured using an NE213 liquid organic scintillator at the Kyushu University Tandem accelerator Laboratory. The gamma-ray energy spectra were obtained by an unfolding method using FORIST code. The response functions of the NE213 detector were calculated by EGS5 incorporated in PHITS code. Results and Discussion: The measured gamma-ray spectra show some pronounced peaks corresponding to gamma-ray transitions between discrete levels in residual nuclei, and the measured angular distributions are almost isotropic for both the incident energies. Conclusion: PHITS calculations using INCL, GEM, and EBITEM models reproduce the spectral shapes and the angular distributions generally well, although they underestimate the absolute gamma-ray yields by about 20%.