• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.11
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• pp.3784-3789
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• 2021

We report a simple technique for direct neutron spectroscopy using pure LaCl₃ crystals. Pure LaCl₃ crystals exhibit considerably better pulse shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities with relatively good energy resolution as compared with Ce-doped LaCl₃ crystals. Single crystals of pure and Ce-doped LaCl₃ were grown using an inhouse-developed Bridgman furnace. PSD capabilities of these crystals were investigated using ²⁴¹Am and ¹³⁷Cs sources. Fast neutron detection was tested using a²⁵²Cf source and three separate bands corresponding to electron, proton, and alpha were observed. The proton band induced by the ³⁵Cl(n,p)³⁵S reaction can be used for direct neutron spectroscopy because proton energy is proportional to incident neutron energy. Owing to good scintillation performance and excellent PSD capabilities, pure LaCl₃ is a promising candidate for space detectors and other applications that necessitate gamma/fast neutron discrimination capability.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.7
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• pp.1860-1865
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• 2019

The confinement degradation of the energetic particles during RMP would be a key issue in success of realizing the successful energy production using fusion plasma, because a 3.5 MeV energetic alpha particle should be able to sustain the burning plasma after the ignition. As KSTAR recent results indicate the generation of high-performance plasma(${\beta}_p{\sim}3$), the confinement of the energetic particles is also an important key aspect in neutral beam driven plasma. In general, the measured absolute value of the neutron intensity is generally used for to estimating the confinement time of energetic particles by comparing it with the theoretical value based on transport calculations. However, the availability of, but for its calculation process, many accurate diagnostic data of plasma parameters such as thermal and incident fast ion density, are essential to the calculation process. In this paper, the time evolution of the neutron signal from an He3 counter during the beam blank has permitted to facilitate the estimation of the slowing down time of energetic particles and the method is applied to investigate the fast ion effect on ELM suppressed KSTAR plasma which is heated by high energy deuterium neutral beams.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.1154-1159
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• 2018

Precise prediction of the radiation interaction position in scintillators plays an important role in medical and industrial imaging systems. In this research, the incident position of the gamma rays was predicted precisely in a plastic rod scintillator by using attenuation technique and multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, for the first time. Also, this procedure was performed using nonlinear regression (NLR) method. The experimental setup is comprised of a plastic rod scintillator (BC400) coupled with two PMTs at two sides, a $^{60}Co$ gamma source and two counters that record count rates. Using two proposed techniques (ANN and NLR), the radiation interaction position was predicted in a plastic rod scintillator with a mean relative error percentage less than 4.6% and 14.6%, respectively. The mean absolute error was measured less than 2.5 and 5.5. The correlation coefficient was calculated 0.998 and 0.984, respectively. Also, the ANN technique was confirmed by leave-one-out (LOO) method with 1% error. These results presented the superiority of the ANN method in comparison with NLR and the other methods. The technique and set up used are simpler and faster than other the previous position sensitive detectors. Thus, the time, cost and shielding and electronics requirements are minimized and optimized.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.429-436
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• 2022

Investigations of retrospective dosimetry have shown that components of mobile phones are suitable as emergency dosimeters in case of radiological incidents. For physical dosimetry, components can be read out using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), thermoluminescence (TL) and phototransferred thermoluminescence (PTTL) methods to determine the absorbed dose. This paper deals with a feasibility study of display glass from modern mobile phones that are measured by thermally assisted (Ta) optically stimulated luminescence. Violet (VSL, 405 nm) and infrared (IRSL, 850 nm) LEDs were used for optical stimulation and two protocols (Ta-VSL and Ta-IRSL) were tested. The aim was to systematically investigate the luminescence properties, compare the results to blue stimulated Ta-BSL protocol (458 nm) and to develop a robust measurement protocol for the usage as an emergency dosimeter after an incident with ionizing radiation. First, the native signals were measured to calculate the zero dose signal. Next, the reproducibility and dose response of the luminescence signals were analyzed. Finally, the signal stability was tested after the storage of irradiated samples at room temperature. In general, the developed Ta-IRSL and Ta-VSL protocols indicate usability, however, further research is needed to test the potential of a new protocol for physical retrospective dosimetry.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.207-220
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• 1981

The Np-237 fission cross-sections up to 20 MeV incident neutron energy are calculated by means of the computer code STAPRE- a statistical model code with consideration of preequilibrium decay. The higher chance fissions up to third compound nucleus are taken into account, and the main input parameters in the treatment of fission under consideration of a double-humped fission barrier are carefully adjusted, so that the current trend of experimental data can be fitted within an apparent deviation of about 10% throughout the entire energy range. Results are presented in the form of point-wise cross-section values, and also in the form of graph to demonstrate the shape agreement.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.11
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• pp.4209-4214
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• 2022

Precise modelling of the interaction of ions with materials is important for many applications including material characterization, ion implantation in devices, thermonuclear fusion, hadron therapy, secondary particle production (e.g. neutron), etc. In this study, a new approach using the Geant4 toolkit in combination with the Bayesian regularization (BR) learning algorithm of the feed-forward neural network (FFNN) is developed to estimate the range of ions in materials accurately and quickly. The different incident ions at different energies are interacted with the target materials. The Geant4 is utilized to model the interactions and to calculate the range of the ions. Afterward, the appropriate architecture of the FFNN-BR with the relevant input features is utilized to learn the modelled ranges and to estimate the new ranges for the new cases. The notable achievements of the proposed approach are: 1- The range of ions in different materials is given as quickly as possible and the time required for estimating the ranges can be neglected (i.e. less than 0.01 s by a typical personal computer). 2- The proposed approach can generalize its ability for estimating the new untrained cases. 3- There is no need for a pre-made lookup table for the estimation of the range values.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.1718-1733
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• 2023

The virtual Frisch-grid method for room-temperature radiation detectors has been widely used because of its simplicity and high performance. Recently, side electrodes were separately attached to each surface of the detectors instead of covering the entire detector surface with a single electrode. The side-electrode structure enables the measurement of the three-dimensional (3D) gamma-ray interaction in the detector. The positional information of the interaction can then be utilized to precisely calibrate the response of the detector for gamma-ray spectroscopy and imaging. In this study, we developed a 3D position-sensitive 5 × 5 × 12 mm³ cadmium-zinc-telluride (CZT) detector and applied a flattening method to correct detector responses. Collimated gamma-rays incident on the surface of the detector were scanned to evaluate the positional accuracy of the detection system. Positional distributions of the radiation interactions with the detector were imaged for quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The energy spectra of various radioisotopes were measured and improved by the detector response calibration according to the calculated positional information. The energy spectra ranged from 59.5 keV (emitted by ²⁴¹Am) to 1332 keV (emitted by ⁶⁰Co). The best energy resolution was 1.06% at 662 keV when the CZT detector was voxelized to 20 × 20 × 10.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.42-50
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• 1987

Most of significant defects in the pressure boundaries of nuclear power plant we re dispositioned to be monitored periodically every inservice inspection. Due to the difficulty of the defect sizing during operation, it is necessary to develope the continuous flaw monitoring techniques. The Tip Diffraction method, specifically speaking, spot seems to be suitable for flaw monitoring. The optimum conditions of selecting the transducer were 3.5 MHz and 45-57 degree according to compatibility with the defect height. The effective calculation of the defect height was to assume the fact that the incident beam is parallel. This method would be supplemented to ASME method about the defect characterization for the surface flaw.

• Journal of Korean Vacuum Science & Technology
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.139-144
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• 1999

Hydrogen concentration depth profiles in homoepitaxial Si(001) films grown from hyper-thermal Si beams generated by ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) ion-beam sputtering have been measured by nuclear reaction analyses as a function of film growth temperature and deposition rate. Bulk H concentrations CH in the crystalline Si layers were found tio be below detection limits, 1${\times}$1019cm-3, with no indication of significant H surface segregation at the crystalline/amorphous interface region. This is quite different than the case for growth by molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) where strong surface segregation was observed for similar deposition conditions with average CH values of 1${\times}$1020cm-3 in the amorphous overlayer. The markedly decreased H concentrations in the present experiments are due primarily to hydrogen desorption by incident hyperthermal Si atoms. Reduced H surface coverages during growth combined with collisionally-induced filling of interisland trenches and enhanced interlayer mass transport provide an increase in critical epitaxial thicknesses by up to an order of magnitude over previous MBE results.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.36-41
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• 2002

The cause and the elimination method for the chattering phenomena were investigated in a check valve attached to the exit of an auxiliary cooling water pump in a Korean nuclear powerplant. From the site experiment and the numerical calculation, the incident angle of the disk was so small that it was not able to produce the sufficient lifting force to overcome the gravitational component of the disk weight. Moreover, it turned out that the installation position was not symmetric for the secondary vortical flow generated inside the elbow so that the flow structure had strongly unstable flow characteristics. From this study, the tapping noise and the chattering phenomena were eliminated exactly by changing the incidence angle of the valve disk and the installation position of the calve body.