: CR-39 Solid State Nuclear Track Detecting foils (SSNTD), along with 1 mm thick polyethylene radiator, sealed in triple laminated pouches, are used for country wide Fast Neutron Personnel Monitoring in India. With the present system of processing by elevated temperature electrochemical etching (ETECE) and evaluation using automatic image analysis, only 16 foils are processed at a time and it is useful over the dose equivalent range 0.2 mSv to 10 mSv. It has been reported that, by processing CR-39 of good detection efficiency by chemical etching at elevated temperature, more numbers of foils can be processed simultaneously.In the present study, CR-39 foils from Pershore Moulding (UK) have been chemically etched using 7 N KOH under various conditions of temperature and etching durations and evaluated using high magnification microscope. The duration of chemical etching, has been optimized at a constant temperature of 60°C for chemical etching process. The characteristics of the chemically etched CR-39 foils are compared with the characteristics of the CR-39 foils processed by the existing system of ETECE and the detailed results are presented in the full text of the paper. It has been observed that by chemical etching process, the dose equivalent range of CR-39 foils can be extended above 60 mSv.
: Presently, CR-39 Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors (SSNTD) is being used for Fast NeutronPersonnel Monitoring in India. Individual detectors are cut manually from CR-39 sheets. Laser-cutting of the sheets will ensure precision and also save on the laborious efforts involved in sheet cutting. It was observed that there is a slight increase in background tracks due to laser-cutting. Studies were carried out on the effect of chemical pre-etching at higher temperatures in properties of CR-39 such as the background, sensitivity and minimum measurable dose. For this purpose a pre-etch step was included in the normal processing of the CR-39 foils in an elevated temperature electrochemical cell (ETECE cell) and the duration for pre-etch step at elevated temperature was optimized.Samples of CR-39 exposed to dose equivalents ranging from 1 mSv to 10 mSv using Am-Be neutron source were processed by both the methods, under normal processing using ECE cell and in the optimized chemical pre-etch followed by normal processing. The dose responses of CR-39 processed by both methods are compared in this paper.
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