Determination of the flows profile in the role of power in the central thimble of TRIGA Mark III Reactor

The overall objective of the thesis project is to determine the flow profiles sub cadmic and epi cadmic in the central thimble to different powers and operation times of TRIGA Mark III Reactor, using activation foils as detectors. In the reactor operation, it is necessary to know the neutron flow profile for to realize other tasks as: the radioisotopes production, research in reactors physics and fuel burning. The distribution of the neutron flow, accurately reflects what is happening in the reactor core, plus the flows value in this distribution is directly related to the power generated. For this reason it is performed the sub cadmic flow measurement with energies between 0 and 0.4 eV (energy of the cadmium cut Ecd ∼ 0.4 eV) and epi cadmic flow with energies greater than 0.4 eV, in the central thimble powers to the powers of 10, 100 W, 1, 10 100 Kw and 1 MW. The method used is known as flakes activation, which is to be arranged by placing flakes ( 3 mm of diameter and 0.0508 mm of thickness) of a given material (either Au, In, Cu, Mn, etc.) into an aluminum tube outside diameter equal to 6.35 mm, alternating flakes with lids covered and discovered of cadmium (3.4 mm of diameter and 0.508 mm of thickness) and separated by lucite pieces of 3 mm of diameter and 25.4 mm in length. After irradiating the flakes for some time, is measured the gamma activity of each of them, using a hyper pure germanium detector of high resolution. Already known gamma activity, proceed to calculate the epi cadmic and sub cadmic flows using a computer program in Fortran language, called Caflu. (Author)