Development of Reader System for Superheated Emulsion Neutron Detector and its Performance Evaluation

The paper presents development of microcontroller based automatic reader system for neutron measurement using indigenously developed superheated emulsion detector and its performance evaluation. The system is designed for real time counting of bubbles formed in superheated emulsion detector. A piezoelectric transducer is used for sensing bubble acoustic during the nucleation. The front end of system is mainly consisting of specially designed signal conditioning unit, piezoelectric transducer, an amplifier, a high-pass filter, a differentiator, a comparator and mono-stable multivibrator. The system is based on PIC 18F6520 microcontroller having large internal SRAM, 10-bit internal ADC, IC interface, UART/USART modules. The paper also describes the design offollowing microcontroller peripheral units viz temperature monitoring, battery monitoring, LCD display, keypad and a serial communication. The reader system measures and displays neutron dose and dose rate, number of bubble and elapsed time. The developed system can be used for detecting very low neutron leakage in the accelerators, nuclear reactors and nuclear submarines. The important features of system are compact, light weight, cost effective and high neutron sensitivity. The prototype was tested and evaluated by exposing to Am-Be neutron source and all the results are compared with response of the conventional neutron REM counter (Cardinal Health, Australia).