A plasma focus device aimed at working in environmental conditions not tailored for nuclear equipment has been developed by ENEA. It can operate in deuterium at 1 Hz shot rate, with an average neutron production of 3 × 10 8 neutrons/shot at 6 kJ of capacitor energy. It is easy to transport and conceived for those industrial purposes where a rather intense neutron generator is required but the use of tritium is forbidden. The machine is designed to be reliable and uniform in emission and to be operated in the field by personnel who are not specialists, to meet the requirements of the possible transformation into a commercial product.
By exploiting the gamma detector-shielding
configuration in a plasma focus (PF) device dedicated to
fast-neutron activation analysis of gold, a reliable neutron counter
may be established. The decay of 207Pbm induced by
neutrons in the lead shielding surrounding the photon detector
produces gamma photons of 569.7 and 1063.6 keV, which peaks are
registered in the same spectrum containing the 279 keV peak of
the photons following the 197Aum decay from fast-neutron
activation. These decay peaks are found to be linearly
correlated to the neutron flux and represent a stable and
robust internal standard for monitoring the intrinsic
variability in neutron flux production by PF devices. A
comparison with the usual external neutron counter techniques
shows a great improvement both for the calibration assessment
and for the in-field measurements when this internal
counter is considered.
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