NAA of Egyptian iron ore samples

Iron ore samples of known weights, one from Umm Nar and three from Wadi Kareim of the eastern desert of Egypt were wrapped in known weight envelops of aluminum foils of the type used in cooking. In order to estimate the background contribution of the aluminum foil to the iron sample, an empty aluminum envelope of known weight was added to the collection. A set of pure iron, cobalt, zirconium and tungsten standards, for measuring reactor parameters fanda, in addition to a bare and a cadmium covered thin gold foils, for confirming thermal and epithermal neutron flux measurements, were added to the collection, f is the thermal to epithermal neutron flux ratio, a is the deviation of the power of the reciprocal of the neutron energy E of the epithermal neutron spectrum from the ideal 1/E law. The whole collection were co-irradiated for 32.66 hours in a can 75A00 in the irradiation box 110 at the core periphery of the second Egyptian research reactor ETRR-2 at 16 MW. The thermal and epithermal neutron fluxes were found to be 3.8143 E + 13 and 9.4815 E + 11 neutrons /cm2.s, respectively. The epithermal neutron spectrum was found to be proportional to 1/E0948. The gamma-ray spectrum of each sample was measured several times for periods between 3600 and 5000 sec. during eight weeks post irradiation. Iron was the major element (about 30%) of the ore samples. Traces of scandium, chromium, cobalt, zinc, Lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, samarium, ytterbium, lutetium hafnium, gold and thorium were found in some of the ore samples. FORTRAN computer programs were written for applying the ko standardization method in the elemental analysis. The activation by epithermal neutrons was taken into consideration in addition to that by thermal neutrons. Corrections for the spectrometer dead time as well as the decay during the measurement periods were also performed