• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.452-461
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• 1998

The pin power distribution is determined by analyzing the rotational gamma scanning data for 36 element fuel bundle of HANARO. A fission monitor of Nb$^{95}$ is chosen by considering the criteria of the half-life, fission yield, emitting ${\gamma}$-ray energy and probability. The ${\gamma}$-ray spectra were measured in Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute(KAERI) by using a HPGe detector and by rotating the fuel bundle at steps of 10$^{\circ}$. The counting rates of Nb$^{95}$ 766 keV ${\gamma}$-rays are determined by analyzing the full absorption peak in the spectra. A 36$\times$36 response matrix is obtained from calculating the contribution of each rod at every scanning angle by assuming 2-dimensional and parallel beam approximations for the measuring geometry. In terms of the measured counting rates and the calculated response matrix, an inverse problem is set up for the unknown distribution of activity concentrations of pins. To select a suitable solving method, the performances of three direct methods and the iterative least-square method are tested by solving simulation examples. The final solution is obtained by using the iterative least-square method that shows a good stability. The influences of detection error, step size of rotation and the collimator width are discussed on the accuracy of the numerical solution. Hence an improvement in the accuracy of the solution is proposed by reducing the collimator width of the scanning arrangement.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.1045-1051
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• 2023

In this study, we fabricated a liquid light-guide-based radiation sensor with a LaBr₃:Ce scintillator for remote gamma-ray spectroscopy. We acquired the energy spectra of Cs-137 and Co-60 using the proposed sensor, estimated the energy resolutions of the full energy peaks, and compared the scintillation light output variations. The major peaks of the radionuclides were observed in each result, and the estimated energy resolutions were similar to that of a general NaI(Tl) scintillation detector without a liquid light guide. Moreover, we showed the relationships of energy resolution and analog-to-digital channel regarding the number of photoelectrons produced and confirmed the effects of light guide length on remote gamma-ray spectroscopy. The proposed sensor is expected to be utilized to perform remote gamma-ray spectroscopy for distances of 3 m or more and would find application in many fields of nuclear facilities and industry.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.1633-1637
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• 2019

While considering the photon attenuation coefficient (${\mu}$) and its related parameters for photons shielding, it is necessary to account for its transmitted and reflected photons energy spectra and dose contribution. Monte Carlo simulation was used to study the efficiency of clay ($1.99g\;cm^{-3}$) as a shielding material below 150 keV photon. Am-241 gamma source and an X-ray of 150 kVp were calculated. The calculated value of ${\mu}$ for Am-241 is higher within 5.61% compared to theoretical value for a single-energy photon. The calculated half-value layer (HVL) is 0.9335 cm, which is lower than that of ordinary concrete for X-ray of 150 kVp. A thickness of 2 cm clay was adequate to attenuate 90% and 85% of the incident photons from Am-241 and X-ray of 150 kVp, respectively. The same thickness of 2 cm could shield the gamma source dose rate of Am-241 (1 MBq) down to $0.0528{\mu}Sv/hr$. For X-ray of 150 kVp, photons below 60 keV were significantly decreased with 2 cm clay and a dose rate reduction by ~80%. The contribution of reflected photons and dose from the clay is negligible for both sources.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.317-323
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• 2014

Odyssey, one of the NASA's Mars exploration program and SELENE (Kaguya), a Japanese lunar orbiting spacecraft have a payload of Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (GRS) for analyzing radioactive chemical elements of the atmosphere and the surface. In these days, gamma-ray spectroscopy with a High-Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector has been widely used for the activity measurements of natural radionuclides contained in the soil of the Earth. The energy spectra obtained by the HPGe detectors have been generally analyzed by means of the Window Analysis (WA) method. In this method, activity concentrations are determined by using the net counts of energy window around individual peaks. Meanwhile, an alternative method, the so-called Full Spectrum Analysis (FSA) method uses count numbers not only from full-absorption peaks but from the contributions of Compton scattering due to gamma-rays. Consequently, while it takes a substantial time to obtain a statistically significant result in the WA method, the FSA method requires a much shorter time to reach the same level of the statistical significance. This study shows the validation results of FSA method. We have compared the concentration of radioactivity of $^{40}K$, $^{232}Th$ and $^{238}U$ in the soil measured by the WA method and the FSA method, respectively. The gamma-ray spectrum of reference materials (RGU and RGTh, KCl) and soil samples were measured by the 120% HPGe detector with cosmic muon veto detector. According to the comparison result of activity concentrations between the FSA and the WA, we could conclude that FSA method is validated against the WA method. This study implies that the FSA method can be used in a harsh measurement environment, such as the gamma-ray measurement in the Moon, in which the level of statistical significance is usually required in a much shorter data acquisition time than the WA method.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1990.07a
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• pp.195-198
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• 1990

In order to investigate the radiation effects induced to electrical properties of Biaxially-Oriented Polypropylen film, several observations were carried out to the sample irradiated to various dose by $Co^{60}-{\gamma}$ ray, on the characteristics of TSC spectra measuered as a function of electric field applied to a sample of 15[ ${\mu}m$] thick. The TSC spectra observed in the temperature range of $153{\sim}403[K]$ with the electric field of intensity $10{\sim}60$ [MV/m], have shown two of the distinguished peak such as ${\beta}$, ${\alpha}$, each of which appeared at $-5{\sim}20$ [ $^{\circ}C$] and 90 [ $^{\circ}C$] respectively. As the conclusions, obtained from the studies, the origin of ${\alpha}$ peak in TSC seems to be attributed by thermal excitation of ions trapped with $0.4{\sim}0.8[eV]$ deep, at the defects formed by $Co^{60}-{\gamma}$ irradiation in a crystaline region. The origin of ${\beta}$ peak was regarded as the depolarization process of "OH" or "CO" dipole with the activation energy of $0.4{\sim}0.6[eV]$ in an amorphous region.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.1718-1733
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• 2023

The virtual Frisch-grid method for room-temperature radiation detectors has been widely used because of its simplicity and high performance. Recently, side electrodes were separately attached to each surface of the detectors instead of covering the entire detector surface with a single electrode. The side-electrode structure enables the measurement of the three-dimensional (3D) gamma-ray interaction in the detector. The positional information of the interaction can then be utilized to precisely calibrate the response of the detector for gamma-ray spectroscopy and imaging. In this study, we developed a 3D position-sensitive 5 × 5 × 12 mm³ cadmium-zinc-telluride (CZT) detector and applied a flattening method to correct detector responses. Collimated gamma-rays incident on the surface of the detector were scanned to evaluate the positional accuracy of the detection system. Positional distributions of the radiation interactions with the detector were imaged for quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The energy spectra of various radioisotopes were measured and improved by the detector response calibration according to the calculated positional information. The energy spectra ranged from 59.5 keV (emitted by ²⁴¹Am) to 1332 keV (emitted by ⁶⁰Co). The best energy resolution was 1.06% at 662 keV when the CZT detector was voxelized to 20 × 20 × 10.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.1037-1048
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• 2022

A radioactive isotope identification algorithm is a prerequisite for a low-resolution scintillation detector applied to an unmanned radiation monitoring system. In this paper, a sparse representation with dictionary learning approach is proposed and applied to plastic gamma-ray spectra. Label-consistent K-SVD was used to learn a discriminative dictionary for the spectra corresponding to a mixture of four isotopes (¹³³Ba, ²²Na, ¹³⁷Cs, and ⁶⁰Co). A Monte Carlo simulation was employed to produce the simulated data as learning samples. Experimental measurement was conducted to obtain practical spectra. After determining the hyper parameters, two dictionaries tailored to the learning samples were tested by varying with the source position and the measurement time. They achieved average accuracies of 97.6% and 98.0% for all testing spectra. The average accuracy of each dictionary was above 96% for spectra measured over 2 s. They also showed acceptable performance when the spectra were artificially shifted. Thus, the proposed method could be useful for identifying radioisotopes in gamma-ray spectra from a plastic scintillation detector even when a dictionary is adapted to only simulated data. Furthermore, owing to the outstanding properties of sparse representation, the proposed approach can easily be built into an insitu monitoring system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.30-41
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• 2002

The neutron beam is fully characterized for the prompt gamma activation analysis facility at Hanaro in the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute(KAERI). The facility uses thermal neutrons which are diffracted vertically from a horizontal beam port by a set of pyrolytic graphite(PG) crystals positioned at the Bragg angle of 45" Neutron spectra, neutron flux and Cd-ratio are determined for the three extraction modes of diffracted beam by means of the theoretical and experimental efforts. To obtain theoretical result, the reflectivity of pyrolytic graphite is calculated in the diffraction model for mosaic crystal and the angular divergence after diffraction by mosaic crystal is estimated from Monte Carlo simulation. The time-of-flight spectrometer and gold activation wire are used for measuring the neutron spectra. Both the calculated and measured spectra have proven that the unique feature of polychromatic beam obtained by PG crystals are useful for PGAA. The thermal neutron flux of 7.9$\times$107 n/cm$^2$s and the Cd-ratio of 266 for gold have been achieved at the sample position while the reactor operates at 24 MW The uniformity of beam flux is 12% in the central 1$\times$1 cm$^2$ area. Finally, the beam is briefly characterized by the effective velocity and temperature which are determined by measuring the prompt Y-ray spectra for thin and thick boron samples.ples.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.13-18
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• 2011

In this study, simulations were done of a 661.6 keV line from a point source of $^{137}Cs$ housed in a lead shield. When increasing the scattering angle from 60 to 120 degrees with a 6061 aluminum alloy target placed at angles of 30 and 45 degrees to the incident beam, the spectra showed that the single scattering component increases and that the multiple scattering component decreases. The investigation of the single and multiple scattering components was carried out using a MCNP5 simulation code. The component of the single Compton scattering photons is proportional to the target electron density at the point where the scattering occurs. The single scattering peak increases according to the thickness of the target and saturates at a certain thickness. The signal-to-noise ratio was found to decrease according to the target thickness. The simulation was experimentally validated by measurements. These results will be used to determine the best conditions under which this method can be applied to testing electron densities or to assess the thickness of samples to locate defects in them.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.125-128
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• 2005

In this paper, we argue that the gigahertz peaked spectrum (GPS) quasars are special blazars, blazars in dense and dusty gas enviornment. The ROSAT detection rate of GPS quasars is similar to that of flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs), suggesting that the relativistic jets in GPS quasars are oriented at small angle to the line of sight. Due to strong inverse Compton scattering off infrared photons from dense and dusty nuclear interstellar media in GPS quasars, most of them may have significant soft gamma-ray and X-ray emission, which is consistent with ASCA X-ray observations. Because Compton cooling in GPS quasars is stronger than that in FSRQs, synchrotron emission in GPS quasars may less dominate over thermal emission of the accretion disk and hot dust, hence most GPS quasars show low optical polarization and small variability, consistent with observations. We suggest that it is the significant radio emission of electron/positron pairs produced by the interaction of gamma-rays with the dense gas and dust grains in GPS quasars that makes GPS quasars show steep radio spectra, low radio polarization, and relatively faint VLBI/VLBA cores. Whether GPS quasars are special blazars can be tested by gamma-ray observations with GLAST in the near future, with the detection rate of GPS quasars being similar to that of FSRQs.