The Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Safeguards (NA-241) is supporting the project “Coincidence Counting With Boron-Based Alternative Neutron Detection Technology” at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for development of an alternative neutron coincidence counter. The goal of this project is to design, build and demonstrate a boron-lined proportional tube based alternative system in a configuration typically used for 3He-based coincidence counter applications. The specific application selected for boron-lined tube replacement in this project was one of the Uranium Neutron Coincidence Collar (UNCL) designs. This report, providing results for model development of a UNCL, is a deliverable under Task 2 of the project. The current UNCL instruments utilize 3He tubes. As the first step in developing and optimizing a boron-lined proportional counter based version of the UNCL, models of eight different 3He-based UNCL detectors currently in use were developed and evaluated. A comparison was made between the simulated results and measured efficiencies for those systems with values reported in the literature. The reported experimental measurements for efficiencies and die-away times agree to within 10%.
Revised: August 22, 2012 |
Published: July 30, 2012