Conveners
The MeASURe Experience - Part 1
- Andy Buffler (UCT)
Positron Emission particle tracking (PEPT) is a non-invasive nuclear imaging technique used to investigate the dynamics of opaque granular and multiphase flowing systems. The basis of PEPT is to attach a sufficient positron emitting isotope to a selected particle to act as a representative of the bulk material under study for a system of interest. The resultant gamma photon pairs produced by...
Conventional positron emission tomography (PET) scanners use a front-end analogue acquisition pipeline to determine position, energy, and time of arrival for each event. The pipeline operates in real time with processing and event selection occurring at MHz rates. Although this linear approach scales well to large arrays of detectors operating in parallel, much of the available information is...
Positron emission particle tracking (PEPT) is used to track the motion of tracer particles in the mineral separation process of froth flotation. Previous measurements with PEPT were performed at a target location rate of 1.0 kHz due to the 1.0 ms precision of the timestamp recorded by the Siemens ECAT “EXACT3D” HR++ positron emission tomography (PET) scanner at the PEPT Cape Town facility in...
The non-destructive testing of concrete used in nuclear facilities is critical as the concrete is exposed to various unfavourable conditions such as corrosion, radiation, extremely varying temperatures, and cyclic loadings over its lifetime. Such exposure can lead to concrete deterioration and moisture loss, thus compromising the shielding and structural integrity of the concrete [1, 2]. This...
Developing methods to non-destructively determine the elemental composition of bulk materials is important in a broad range of contexts, including food and agriculture, coal and minerals processing, contraband detection, and nuclear regulation [1,2]. Neutron-based techniques are advantageous as neutrons are highly penetrating, sensitive to low mass nuclei and produce characteristic secondary...
Organic liquid scintillator detectors such as those based on BC-501A are widely used by metrology laboratories as the reference for measurements of fast and high-energy neutron fields, however these scintillators are composed of highly toxic, flammable, and volatile aromatics. These detectors are coupled with a high-voltage photomultiplier tube, NIM standard pulse processing modules and an...
There has been a high level of interest across the world in the use of well-characterized neutron beams of energy 10-200 MeV for investigating physical problems connected with radiation therapy, radiation protection and intermediate-energy nuclear physics and neutron cross section measurements that span a wide range of applications. Experiments in these fields often require that the neutron...
