Thermal neutron intensity measurement with fission chamber in current, pulse and Campbell modes

In thermal nuclear reactors, most of the power is generated by thermal neutron induced fission. Therefore, fission chambers with targets that respond directly to slow neutrons are of great interest for thermal neutron flux measurements due to relatively low sensitivity to gamma radiation. However, the extreme conditions associated with experiments at very low cross section demand highly possible thermal neutron flux, leading often to substantial design changes. In this paper we report design of a fission chamber for wide range (from 10 to 1012 n/cm2 sec) measurement of thermal neutron flux. Test experiments were performed at the first beam of IBR2 pulsed reactor using digital pulse processing (DPP) technique with modern waveform digitizers (WFD). The neutron pulses detected by the fission chamber in each burst (5 Hz repetition rate) of the reactor were digitized and recorded to PC memory for further on-line and off-line analysis. New method is suggested to make link between the pulse counting, the current mode and the Campbell technique.

Nuclear fission investigation with twin ionization chamber

In this paper, we report recent results obtained in the development of digital pulse processing mathematics for prompt fission neutron (PFN) investigations using a twin ionization chamber (TIC) along with a fast neutron time-of-flight detector (ND). Due to some ambiguities in the literature concerning a pulse induction on TIC electrodes by fission fragment (FF) ionization, we first presented a detailed mathematical analysis of FF signal formation on the TIC anode. The analysis was done using the Shockley–Ramo theorem, which gives the relation between charged particle motion between TIC electrodes and the so-called weighting potential. The weighting potential was calculated by direct numerical solution of the Laplace equation (neglecting space charge) for the TIC geometry and ionization caused by FFs. Formulae for GI correction and digital pulse processing algorithms for PFN time-of-flight measurements and pulse shape analysis are presented and used in experiments for PFN investigations of two reactions, [Formula: see text]U(n[Formula: see text],f) and [Formula: see text]Cf(sf). Results of the measurements were compared to literature data to demonstrate the feasibility of the new developed techniques. These results were necessary for the development of a new PFN investigation facility consisting of a position sensitive fission fragment detector combined with 32 liquid scintillation neutron detectors.

System noise of a digital pulse processing module for nuclear instrumentation

Digital pulse processing finds a widespeed use in nuclear instrumentation. This work presents a digital pulse processing (DPP) module based on an FPGA and a 16-bit 125 MHz ADC and analyses the system noise distribution by acquired digital data using this system. A moving average filter is utilized to suppress the system noise of the DPP module. Furthermore, digital trapezoidal filter is applied for the use with a charge sensitive preamplifier with High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector. The energy spectrum and corresponding resolution are demonstrated with a scintillation and semiconductor detector.