Dresden 2013 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 75: Anwendungen kernphysikalischer Methoden

HK 75.7: Talk

Thursday, March 7, 2013, 18:45–19:00, HSZ-204

Tritium Measurement in Water using Bremsstrahlung X-Rays and a Silicon Drift Detector — •Simon Niemes — Karlsruhe Institut of Technology, Institute for Technical Physics - Tritium Laboratory, Karlsruhe, Germany

Applications like future fusion plants or scientific experiments like KATRIN need a closed tritium infrastructure to cycle and handle tritium safely. At some process stages tritiated water (HTO) is generated, making measuring the tritium content in HTO vital for process control, accountancy and safety.

There are several methods used to measure HTO, primarily Liquid Scintillation Counting (LSC). A new technique promising fast, in-line and wasteless measurement compared to LSC is the Beta Induced X-ray Spectroscopy (BIXS). The principle of BIXS is detecting the bremsstrahlung spectrum from the decelerated decay electrons in water and calibrate it to known concentrations.

A novel approach utilizing a Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) to measure the emitted X-ray spectrum has several advantages over other detector types like scintillation counters. A SDD is a semiconductor detector with very low noise and good energy resolution, suitable for detecting the low intensity, low energy signal from BIXS.

In this talk an overview of the experimental setup and detector will be given and first results will be presented.