Dual range digital nuclear spectrometer
AssigneePrinceton Gamma Tech. Instruments Inc.
InventorGreg Nelson
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A spectrometer (100) for detecting a source of radioactive emissions having a detector (120) that produces a detector signal (20), with an amplifier (30) followed by a single digitizer (40) followed by a digital signal processing unit (50), within which the signal processing implements two distinct pathways (51, 52), and associated firmware to utilize the two resulting sets of processed data in nuclear isotope identification.
Claims30
A method for measuring the radioactivity of a radioactive source comprising the operation of a nuclear spectrometer wherein:
- a) gamma rays from said source are first received by a scintillation detector which converts said gamma rays to an analog detector signal corresponding to the source gamma ray;
- b) processing the analog detector signal with an amplifier;
- c) digitizing the amplified signal with an analog-to-digital converter to produce a set of digital samples;
- d) processing the digital samples through two signal-processing algorithms simultaneously;
- e) storing the two processing results in two distinct spectra, and
- f) merging the two distinct spectra in analytical processing to characterize the gamma ray source signal.
A nuclear spectrometer adapted for processing an analog detector signal with high dynamic range comprising:
- a) a detector that generates analog signals generated from a source of radiation emission;
- b) an amplifier that processes the analog signals to a level appropriate for digitization;
- c) an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that converts the signals into digital signals;
- d) a digital signal processor that computes two or more different functions of the digital signals and simultaneously converts these into two or more spectra;
- and;
- e) a central processing unit with random access storage memory which processes the two or more spectra from the digital signal processor to provide an analytical result.
A nuclear spectrometer adapted for processing an analog detector signal with high dynamic range comprising:
- a) a detector that generates analog signals generated from a source of radiation emission;
- b) an amplifier that processes the analog signals to a level appropriate for digitization;
- c) an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that converts the signals into digital signals;
- d) a digital signal processor that computes two or more different functions of the digital signals and converts these into two or more spectra;
- e) a central processing unit with random access storage memory which processes spectra from the digital signal processor to provide an analytical result;
- wherein the digital signal processor additionally converts the two or more spectra to a single spectrum that has different bin widths as a function of energy, with high resolution in some portions of the spectrum and low resolution in other portions of the spectrum.
A nuclear spectrometer adapted for processing an analog detector signal with high dynamic range comprising:
- a) a detector that generates analog signals generated from a source of radiation emission;
- b) an amplifier that processes the analog signals to a level appropriate for digitization;
- c) an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that converts the signals into digital signals;
- d) a digital signal processor that computes two or more different functions of the digital signals and converts these into two or more spectra;
- e) a central processing unit with random access storage memory for these spectra, which are processed to provide an analytical result, the processing comprising individually matching the spectra to distinct libraries matched to the characteristics of those spectra.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.