Development of a Temperature Compensation Method for the Radiation Detector of a Radiation Monitoring System

Americium, which has been used to date for the assessment of integrity and efficiency of the radiation detector, was replaced by an LED to resolve these problems. However, while americium is negligibly affected by the temperature and the surrounding environment, the LED is significantly affected by the temperature. Accordingly, a method to resolve this issue is needed. In this study, a temperature-compensated preamplifier was developed, where the reference luminous output of the LED affecting on temperatures is constantly maintained to be uniform by controlling the current and the PMT gain difference is compensated by controlling the high voltage from a comparison of the input and output pulse values. After setting up the experimental apparatus, the validity of the preamplifier was verified through radiation measurement experiments where the temperature was varied from 10 .deg. C to 60 .deg. C. The output signals of the scintillation detector of the RMS are intricately related to the temperature. In particular, the output signal value is greatly affected by the thermal equilibrium in the process of converting electro-magnetic energy to light energy and back to electrical energy. To compensate for these temperature characteristics, the americium standard source is used, since it is not affected by temperature, or a temperature compensation method using an LED optical-pulse as a reference value is used. In this study, instead of the americium standard source, an LED and a temperature detector were used to develop a temperature compensation device for the PMT amplification factor. To verify the validity of the developed method, a reference temperature of 25 .deg. C and a reference current of a 60μA LED optical-pulse were used to experimentally measure the radiation while varying the temperature from 10 .deg. C to 60 .deg. C using a Cs-137 standard source. The experiment results showed that the measurement error is reduced by approximately 83.3 % by using the temperature compensation