Nuclear Techniques ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (3): 30401-030401.

• NUCLEAR ELECTRONICS AND INSTRUMENTATION •

### Instrument design for continuous monitoring of radioactive aerosol

LI Qiang1 ZENG Guoqiang1 CAI Jun2 CHEN Mingming2 MA Yinghao3 TU Chuanhuo2 TAN Chengjun1

1. 1(College of Nuclear Technology and Automation Engineering, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, China) 2(Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiading Campus, Shanghai 201800, China) 3(China Institute for Radiation Protection, Taiyuan 030006, China)
• Received:2014-10-30 Revised:2014-12-10 Online:2015-03-10 Published:2015-03-09

Abstract: Background: In the process of nuclear related production or processing, nuclear fuel and other radioactive substances will produce radioactive aerosols which is harmful to the environment and human health. The commercial available monitor of radioactive material is either poor in continuity or limited in measuring radioactive aerosols. Purpose: This study aims to design a radioactive aerosol monitor for continuous concentration surveillance of radioactive aerosol in real time. Method: This instrument’s stability and efficiency has been improved with the IPC+ARM architecture and the SQLite database which can store massive amounts of nuclear data and other information. After operating the spectral data which gathered by multi-channel pulse height analysis with α/β ratio method, we embedded some algorithms that recommended on ISO 11929-5 to calculate the concentration. Results: We have achieved a high precision and the instrument has been run steadily for a long time. Conclusion: This paper described the design for continuous monitoring of radioactive aerosol, and enhances the stability and efficiency of the system in hardware and software. Finally, in the processing of spectral data collected by multi-channel pulse amplitude analyzer, we have achieved a high precision with ISO11929-5 algorithms and verified the feasibility of the system.