EVALUATING DEAD TIME CORRECTIONS IN REACTOR NEUTRONS DETECTOR READINGS USING THE BACKWARD EXTERPOLATION METHOD

摘要

Dead time effect in neutron detections, caused by both the detector and the electronics dead time, is a highly non-linear effect, known to create high biasing in physical experiments as the power grows over a certain threshold. Modeling the dead time is a highly complicated task, due to the different nature of the loss of counts in the different components of the monitoring system (paralyzable Vs. non-paralyzable), and the stochastic nature of the fission chains. In the present study, we introduce a new technique for dead time corrections, based on extrapolating the losses due to artificially enforced dead time on the data back to zero. The method has been implemented on actual neutron counting from the MINERVE reactor, demonstrating high accuracy in restoring the corrected count rate.