A Confident Configuration for an Environmental Radiation Monitoring System

This work presents a high-resolution, high-confidence, and high-temperature-stabilization prototype environmental radiation monitoring system (ERMS) with integrated digital filter, peak-finding algorithms, and real-time analyses. Through measuring 137Cs and 60Co radiation sources with the same NaI(Tl) detector, the features of the digital multichannel analyzer (DMCA) in our system, including throughput, energy resolution, and peak shape, were compared with those of a commercial instrument, namely the DSPEC jr 2.0 from ORTEC, USA. The results indicate that the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) and peak heights obtained with our DMCA are better than those obtained with the DSPEC jr 2.0 up to 12%. The ERMS also integrates a solar power supply, multimodal data transmission, and a weather channel, thus facilitating its deployment in boundary areas or far islands for monitoring and forecasting radioactive propagation. Therefore, the proposed configuration system is highly promising in terms of performance and low cost of maintenance. © 1963-2012 IEEE.