C Sabbarese | PubMed Health

PubMed2000

A compact multiparameter acquisition system for radon concentration studies

A compact device suitable to acquire and display, at the same time, radon concentrations in a given atmosphere, and the environmental parameters characterising the atmosphere, is presented and described. It consists of two main blocks: (i) a detection section including a set of sensors for measuring pressure, humidity and temperature, and a set of silicon surface barrier detectors mounted in electrostatic cells collecting the ionised radon daughters; (ii) a single NIM module featuring an eight channel 12 bit ADC and the linear electronics to shape the signals from the silicon detectors. The system is controlled by a computer via a RS232 port. The software, implemented in Visual Basic, allows to display the energy distribution of the pulses coming from the alpha detectors and to initialise and control all phases of the acquisition. The results of preliminary tests show the high reliability of the system.

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The influence of environmental parameters in electrostatic cell radon monitor response.

To better understand the influence of air parameters such as pressure, humidity and temperature on the counting efficiency of a radon monitor based on solid state silicon detectors and radon daughter electrostatic collection, a number of experimental and theoretical studies have been performed. This study has been carried out using a multiparameter acquisition system used to monitor radon, temperature, pressure and relative humidity. Results show that air humidity and temperature inside the cell influence radon daughter collection in a significant way. For the tested cell, a decrease of the 218Po counting efficiency vs. humidity and temperature increase was measured in the ranges from 10% to 90% and from 15 degrees C to 35 degrees C, respectively. These effects were also theoretically studied by using Monte-Carlo software, which takes into account electrostatic collection of radon daughters in the cell, by considering the recombination process as a function of climatic parameters. A satisfactory agreement was obtained between experimental measurements and theoretical calculations.

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