Optimization of thermal neutron shield concrete mixture using artificial neural network

High‐pressure behavior and P‐induced phase transition of CaB3O4(OH)3·H2O (colemanite)

“…530.5 (7) 523.1 (7) 513.6 (7) 512.9 (7) 504.9 (6) 499.5 (7) 489.2 (5) 486.9 (6) 484.7 (6) 482.3 (8) 513.4 (5) Unique refls. (3) 24.85 (2) 24.85 (4) 24.81 (4) 24.74 (3) b ( A) 10.2064 (14) 10.1862 (13) 10.1410 (14) 10.1068 (14) 10.0822 (12) 10.0383 (14) 9.9893 (12) 9.9393 (13) c ( A) 11.726 (11) 11.663 (12) 11.692 (10) 11.664 (11) 11.579 (12) 11.578 (14) 11.595 (11) 11.547 (10) b (°) 112.45 (10) 112.64 (10) 112.44 (10) 112.81 (11) 113.18 (10) 113.24 (14) 113.33 (11) 113.50 (10) V (…”

“…Colemanite can also be considered a material of technological and industrial relevance. Several studies have been focused on its use as an additive in concretes . or epoxy‐resins, to improve the shielding efficiency of these materials for neutron radiations, as already suggested for other B‐bearing materials .…”

Thermal stability and high-temperature behavior of the natural borate colemanite: An aggregate in radiation-shielding concretes

“…Colemanite is also largely utilized as a raw material for the production of boric acid [9]. For these reasons, the use of colemanite as an aggregate has been the subject of a series of investigations [10][11][12][13][14]. In the nuclear field, colemanite has been widely applied for the production of radiation-shielding concretes prototypes [5,15], which showed that its addition is efficient in reducing the transmission of radiation [5,10,12] and lowering the concrete activation for radiation emission in the low and medium term [11,15,16].…”

“…By way of example, colemanite could be added to pumice lightweight concrete to improve its radiation shielding, thus extending the applicability of this low density and low cost, high thermal insulation and high durability material to the nuclear field [32]. These applications drove the interest in studying the effects induced by the addition of colemanite on the physico-chemical properties of cements and concretes, from which it emerged that the major drawbacks are a delay in the cement setting and a lowering of the concrete compressive strength [14,17,[26][27][28][29][32][33][34], even though they resulted to be less pronounced than those induced by two other common natural borates as ulexite and borax [34].…”

Recovery of saturated signal waveform acquired from high-energy particles with artificial neural networks

“…To our knowledge, there has been relatively little research concerning the recovery of saturated signals and this is perhaps surprising since many models have been reported which provide a good fit for the waveforms of γ and neutron radiation. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have previously been used to discriminate between neutrons and γ-rays in a liquid scintillation detector [1], to reconstruct the neutron spectrum [2] and to optimize the concrete mixture that will provide a thermal neutron shield [3]. Here we investigate whether ANNs can also be used to successfully recover saturated signals in particle detectors.…”